Dr. David DeSteno

Seriously?

Yeah.

And we've done it with money.

You can get more money on the coin flip, higher or lower.

But what's interesting is when you ask people later, why did they cheat?

They will create a story because no one likes to think of themselves as bad.

So they'll say things like, well, yeah, normally I wouldn't do that.

But, you know, I had an appointment later and I just wanted to make sure I wasn't late and I thought that that longer task might be a problem.

Or my favorite one was because the bad task was like logic problems they had to solve, one person said.

well, you know, the guy who was sitting next to me in the waiting room, and I know would get the one that I didn't choose, he was an engineer.

So I thought he would like the logic problems that took a lot longer to do, right?

And so people are creating these stories.

And so the point of this is that

If it was public, no one would ever cheat.

Like, you know, when I go on TV, people will say, can we do one of your cheating experiments?

And I'm like, no, no one's going to cheat when they're like, you know, have the TV cameras on them.

Right.

But when you can get away with it, your brain changes the computations of what's valuable.

You will cheat because it's adaptive to not exert extra energy.

You don't have to if there's no reputational cost.