The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves

Written by Dan Ariely

Narrated by Simon Jones

“A lively tour through the impulses that cause many of us to cheat, the book offers especially keen insights into the ways in which we cut corners while still thinking of ourselves as moral people.”  — Time

Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, returns with a thought-provoking work that challenges our preconceptions about dishonesty and urges us to take an honest look at ourselves.

Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat?

How do companies pave the way for dishonesty?

Does collaboration make us more or less honest?

Does religion improve our honesty?

Most of us think of ourselves as honest, but, in fact, we all cheat. From Washington to Wall Street, the classroom to the workplace, unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether it's a white lie to head off trouble or padding our expense reports. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, award-winning author Dan Ariely shows why some things are easier to lie about than others; how getting caught matters less than we think in whether we cheat; and how business practices pave the way for unethical behavior, both intentionally and unintentionally. Ariely explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of us, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards. But all is not lost. Ariely also identifies what keeps us honest, pointing the way for achieving higher ethics in our everyday lives.

With compelling personal and academic findings, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty will change the way we see ourselves, our actions, and others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9780062209320

Dan Ariely

New York Times bestselling author Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University, with appointments at the Fuqua School of Business, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, and the Department of Economics. He has also held a visiting professorship at MIT’s Media Lab. He has appeared on CNN and CNBC, and is a regular commentator on National Public Radio’s Marketplace. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his wife and two children.

Reviews for The Honest Truth About Dishonesty

[Nodar Baghishvili · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Very disappointing book, the author did not make any effort to do a meaningful job

[Anna · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nice book. Just ignore the statement “amalgam vs composite”. Scary truth about cashless society!

[d-fbuser-303292500 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very entertaining and insightful book. Definitely learned a lot on lying, self-deception and the science around it

[Lily · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

ok

[tlcooper_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone - Especially to Ourselves is an interesting dissection and presentation of a number of studies conducted by Dan Ariely and his associates to determine when, how, and why people lie. By setting up a series of similar experiments by altering the conditions of the experiments Ariely discovered factors that influenced people's decisions to lie. He also delved into how people excuse lying to themselves. While I found his conclusions and his methodology compelling, I couldn't help but think that the results weren't as conclusive as they appeared. A number of other factors could've been at play in the thinking processes of the participants in the study. While I believe his premise that people figure out ways to lie and maintain their self-image of being honest, I thought that before I started reading The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty. Ariely confirmed much of what I already believed about lying, but I didn't have any "ah-ha" moments while reading the book. The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty is well-written, interesting, and engaging if at times a tad academic. Ariely's results have the odd effect of making me feel both better and worse about humanity with this presentation of his research into the human struggle to be honest in the face of temptation.

[kwskultety · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mildly interesting.

[cheryl_in_cc_nv · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Five stars means everyone should read it. Two happy evenings in a quiet room should do it - but it'll probably take longer because you'll keep interrupting yourself to share bits with family or housemates.

Good science - Ariely takes his well-done experiments and research out of the college labs, out of the ivory tower, out into the streets, and even around the world. I'm loving the fact that the so-called 'soft' sciences can be studied rigorously by researchers sufficiently dedicated.

Good writing - clear, smart, graceful, engaging, but no forced humor. He clearly cares, sincerely, about what he's studying, and wants to share it with us. No self-righteousness, no pretentiousness, no grubbing for fame or fortune... just a talented, hard-working teacher exploring the frontiers of behavioral economics & psychology with us.

I will say the book is not perfect. The man is influenced by his personal environment, of course. (He'd be the first to admit it.) One footnote mentions that he recently 'discovered' the concept of 'work-hours' (as in, how many hours of wages does it take to pay for a dinner out or a new jacket...). Well, I'm sorry, but I figured this out when I was 17, when I got my first paycheck. Didn't you?

Or more specifically, [W]e all remember the time college friends offered us pizza and beer in exchange for helping them move." Um, no, Dan, we don't.

But those are totally minor quibble. The book is *not* written at a college level, and *is* relevant to all.

We may think we understand white lies, the fudge factor, rationalizations & justifications, plagiarism, pirating, & counterfeiting, wishful blindness, the 'what-the-hell' effect and the 'knew-it-all-along' attitude, the benefits of cooperation, sunshine policies & transparency, story-telling & creativity, temptation & self-deception, etc. etc. - but we've never explored them like this before.

And what about contagion, ego depletion, and resetting rituals? Not sure what those are? Read and find out! And learn how to spot & counter dishonesty in yourself, your co-workers, even your doctor.

Yep, that's right. I'm now actually glad my doctor is joining MDVIP so I have an excuse to get a new one. Betcha you're intrigued now, even if you weren't before! :)"

[othemts · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is a psychological and sociological investigation into lying, with the emphasis on the ways in which all humans more or less lie and cheat throughout their whole lives. Ariely notes that while big scandals like say Enron get headlines for their irrational amount of dishonesty, that these types of problems grow from the small actions of many people making cost-benefit analysis rather than high-level conspiracy. Interesting anecdotes about lying are backed-up by tests and studies. To be honest, I've allowed too much time from listening to this audiobook to writing about, so I'm now fuzzy on the details. But I do recall it is a fascinating book entertainingly performed by Simon Jones.

[blatherlikeme · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this book in one sitting. It is a fascinating look into the inherent dishonesty that lies in all of us. We all cheat. Just a little. White Lies, Pens from the office, travel expenses, etc. But what is interesting is what allows us to cheat; What factors are in place that let us choose to cheat and by how much we will cheat; And how we trick ourselves into rationalizing our cheating.
It's a bit disheartening, and perhaps a bit relieving, to know it just apparently in our nature and that to control it we need to be monitored.
The book is an easy, entertaining and quick read. Like many of these types of books, in order to fill up pages there is a small amount of repetitiveness. But not nearly so much as others I could name that fill up 40 to 50% of the book by repeating themselves.

[wbc3_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I’m a big fan of Ariely’s work and this book is no exception. As in his previous books, he uses a number of behavioral experiments to understand how people act. This book was not as good as Predictably Irrational which I would recommend to everyone. But, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty is well worth reading. The experiments he looks at are variations on one or two primary ones. Basically, they bring in people to take a test that is fairly hard and time consuming. Each person gets a reward such as one dollar for each correct answer. They then vary the conditions to allow for opportunities to cheat and see how that influences the score. One of the big things they do for most of the experiments is have people score the results themselves and then shred their answer sheets. Basically, that means they can cheat and no one will know. Generally, people cheat some, but not too much. So, if there are ten questions and people who can’t cheat would answer five, when given the opportunity to easily cheat, they might claim seven, but not ten. All of this is very interesting, but what makes the book for me are some of Ariely’s personal examples coupled with his conclusions. One of the interesting takeaways is that just reminding people not to cheat has a positive effect.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Ariely engagingly presents research on what encourages (and sometimes discourages) cheating of various kinds. If assured of not being caught, most people will cheat a little; if you authorize it with various kinds of social signals, they will cheat a lot, which explains a lot of progressively worsening bad behavior in organizations. If they see someone from a group they think of as “not us” cheating, however, they will cheat a lot less, and they’ll even cheat less if they just see a picture of eyes. People who know they’re wearing counterfeit sunglasses cheat more. Et cetera—though some of this has appeared in his earlier work, it’s still quite interesting. Among other things, his research suggests that a context-neutral task—like the ones he uses in standard testing, where you solve matrices and then either self-report how many you solved or hand in your solutions (thus creating a control group for how many problems an average participant can solve)—people from different countries cheat at virtually the same rates, despite the researchers’ expectations. It’s only the contexts, like whether bribes for certain things are commonplace in your home country, that authorize or discourage cheating.

[garcia6690 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really liked this book. It was interesting to see the way people would act to different situations and how some simple things could make people more honest. I would recommend this book to everyone. There is some very useful information, it helps you understand what can make people be a little dishonest and some things you can do to minimize that behavior.

I won an uncorrected proof from goodreads First Reads.

[jaylia3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Entertaining, eye-opening, disturbing

This funny, fascinating, personal paradigm shattering book is in a genre I love, books that make me examine my thinking process, but this one caused me more soul searching than any other I’ve read. According to the Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC) we decide whether or not to be dishonest based on a logical, mathematically calibrated cost-benefit analysis, and we’d all be as dishonest as we could be as long as it brought us a benefit greater than the likely cost. Fortunately, author Dan Ariely discovered that people aren’t as cold-bloodedly calculating as that. Unfortunately, the news about human morality isn’t all good.

Ariely is very skilled at conceiving, conducting and describing experiments that tease apart the tangle of human motivations. According to what he’s discovered, we’ll cheat, lie and steal, but only as much as we can rationalize because we want to be able to feel good about ourselves. We’re all capable of dishonesty, and being natural story tellers we’re extremely adept at creating perfectly logical seeming explanations justifying our less than moral actions, though we rarely understand exactly why we make the choices we do. We invariably underestimate how much we are influenced by a myriad of circumstances ranging from conflict of interest to how tired we are feeling.

Since we want to see ourselves as good, most of us never stray far from the straight and narrow path, but small frequent transgressions can create bigger problems than the egregious acts of a few bad apples. Our collective peccadilloes can wreck havoc, but with an improved understanding of the situations that increase dishonest behavior Arliey hopes his book can be a guide for corrective actions and legislation.