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

I love books that make me think. This highly entertaining and easy to understand book challenged my thinking all the way through. I told everyone about it everywhere I went since the studies were so fascinating and the documentation was so clear. I learned much from the book especially about how my creativity has served me so well all my life!

PROS Informative and eye opening. After reading this book you cant help but look at your everyday life a little differently. Dan Ariely takes his time in explaining why we "fudge" the facts just enough so that we can get what we want... but still believe that we are not doing anything wrong. He does this in many creative ways, including fun anecdotes and interesting studies. At the end he quickly sums it all up and offers suggestions to society for the overall improvement of our moral compass. Quick read, not hard to follow for the most part. CONS Many of the issues in this book are similar, and after 5 or six of them it can get a little repetitive. While some of the experiments hold very valid points, a great deal of the others feel as though they were thrown together on a whim. Many of the conclusions that Ariely draws from these haphazard experiments feel as though he somehow reached an EPIC LIFE CHANGING discovery... but the reader is not always sure how they got to such a SPECIFIC statement. BOTTOM LINE If you are looking for an eye opening weekend book that you can discuss for a few hours with friends, this is the book for you. Using studies and social experiments (both industrial-strength and diluted) Dan Ariely shows us how we all have a little bit of the "fudge factor." FAVORITE QUOTE "Facts are for people who lack the imagination to create their own truth." - Anonymous

There is certainly no shortage of lying, cheating and corruption in our society today. At their worst, these phenomena do substantial damage to our communities and the people in them. Picking on the corporate world for just a moment, consider a few high-profile examples from the last decade: the scandals at Enron, WorldCom, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities, Haliburton, Kmart, Tyco, Bristol-Myers Squibb, and a host of banks in the financial crisis of 2008. If you are a particularly pessimistic person, you may think that people are fundamentally self-interested, and will engage in dishonest and corrupt behaviour so long as the potential benefits of this behaviour outweigh the possibility of being caught multiplied by the punishment involved (known as the Simple Model of Rational Crime or SMORC). On the other hand, if you are a particularly optimistic person, you may think that the lying and cheating that we see in our society is largely the result of a few bad apples in the bunch. Given that the way we attempt to curb cheating and corruption depends largely on which view we think is correct, we would do well if we could come up with a proper understanding of these tendencies, and under what circumstances they are either heightened or diminished. Over the past several years, the behavioural economist Dan Ariely, together with a few colleagues, has attempted to do just this--by way of bringing dishonesty into the science lab. Ariely reveals his findings in his new book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone--Especially Ourselves. In order to get at the truth, Ariely invited subjects into his lab and gave them tasks with monetary rewards, and where cheating was a very real and clear possibility. As you can tell from the title of the book, Ariely found that cheating was not in fact confined to a few bad apples, but was in fact very widespread. On the bright side, though, Ariely also found that the vast majority of his subjects did not cheat nearly as much as they could have, but instead confined themselves to just a little bit of cheating. Given his findings, Ariely concludes that most of us are torn between two conflicting impulses. On the one hand is the desire to get ahead by way of dishonesty, and on the other hand is the desire to nevertheless think of ourselves as genuinely honest and good people. Getting the best of the both worlds can be tricky, but we manage to do so by way of resorting to our trusty capacities of rationalization and self-deception. Of course, different people show different powers of rationalization and self-deception, and also different circumstances can alter the terms of the negotiation significantly for each of us, thus leading to more or less cheating. For instance, Ariely found that those who are especially creative are particularly good at rationalization and self-deception, and therefore tend to cheat more so than others. In addition, he also found that several factors influence the amount that people cheat in general. These factors included being reminded of one's morals; having one's resolve broken down by will-power depletion; having one's self-confidence artificially inflated; witnessing other people cheating; cheating to benefit others etc. A full and comprehensive summary of the main argument in the book, as well as many of the juicier details and anecdotes to be found therein, will be available at newbooksinbrief dot wordpress dot com, on or before Monday, Jul

I definitely thought the ideas were interesting...too many case studies drew the book out too much for my liking.