The Truth about Dishonesty
By Charles Rush
February 24, 2013
Exodus 20: 16 and Prov. 6: 16-20 and Rm. 3: 21-24
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ere is nothing quite as maddening to fathers of teenage boys as announcing to a room full of them, your sons included, that you found a back pack full of cans of Budweiser just across the street from your house, under a bush. They eyes glued to the floor, the grimacing faces of incredulity, “No Sir, not me! I mean, you don't think?” And the chorus behind them that confide, in all sincerity, “Mr. Rush, I don't know a thing about that…”
Then again,
these are the very same young men that were assembled in your dining room when
they were three, when three quarters of a plate of chocolate chip cookies
turned up missing, and you ask all five of them if any of them know anything
about the missing cookies. Three of them look down and one of them, nodding
“No” from side to exaggerated side, indicating how hurt he is that his
character would even be questioned, actually has chocolate smeared on the side
of his little innocent face.
The research
is in on the question of dishonesty and the truth is not good, but then we knew
that already. I thought of that this week, watching the father of Oscar Pistorius, having to hear his son attempt to put himself in
the best possible light in a situation from which there is no good camera
angle.
Oscar made a
hasty rendition of his version of what happened the night his girlfriend was
shot to death. Unfortunately for him, he did it before he'd had a chance to
review the literature on domestic violence. I never would have reviewed that
literature on my own, but since I was asked to be the teaching assistant in the
first course taught on domestic violence at Princeton Seminary, I have reviewed
the literature and his emotional appeal fit a well worn pattern that we've now
collected from interviewing thousands and thousands of these tragic situations.
Mr. Pistorius began his appeal by exclaiming that he was
‘deeply deeply in love' with his girlfriend. He went on to say that together
with her, he was ‘very, very happy'. How could it be, you might wonder upon
hearing for this appeal for the very first time, that a man could so
emotionally extol his beloved and kill her at the same time?
It is a important question, I'm still not entirely sure how to
answer. But one thing is clear from listening to grizzly case after grizzly
case, you most certainly can. I guess it is surprising to hear men express such
deep professions of love, deep professions of remorse over the outcome. But the
fact of the matter is we have a dead woman. It is not only possible to be
deeply infatuated with someone you batter or kill, a pretty large percentage of
people that we interview like this, express exactly this contradictory
sentiment.
Christians
used to say that it represents the war inside our souls between good and evil.
The ancient Greek philosophers said it was the struggle between the rational
and the irrational in our psyche. Today our neurologists would show it to you
in MRI images that illustrate the almost independent responses when we
stimulate the frontal cortex, the newest part of our brain, where our capacity
for love, empathy, logic, and long-term planning reside versus when we
stimulate the amygdala, the oldest part of our brain,
where fear, anxiety and aggression reside.
As our
evolutionary scientists never tire of reminding us, the more primordial parts
of our brain, designed to trigger almost autonomic responses to attack or
threat, supersede or override our rational reflections in the midst of a
crisis. It turns out, and you can watch this on a screen, once the forces of
anger and aggression are engaged, they release powerful chemicals that alter
other neural pathways as well. Researchers can't definitively explain this at
present, but they believe that we actually see the situation differently and
find wider justification for our actions in a moment extreme stress.
At any rate,
teenage boys and young men, who engage in violence during the testosterone
driven season of life, are usually surprised and disturbed by just how volcanically
the impulse of violence erupts from below and how profoundly it takes control
of the helm when it happens. You can't believe what you are capable of doing,
how you can be instantly transformed like the Hulk.
No, we are a
violent species, only lately civilized, as our papers daily remind us covering
Syria. Mali, Pakistan, the South side of Chicago, or Newtown, Connecticut.
But what
struck me about Oscar Pistorius, after reading the
latest book on “The Truth About Dishonesty”[i],
is the way he expressed that deep seated human need to cast ourselves in the
best light possible. And it isn't just for others that we do it, we actually
are pretty good at fooling ourselves.
Professor
Dan Ariely, who teaches the Psychology of Economics at Duke University
has had a longer term interest in the role of the irrational in our lives, but
for the past several years he has been interested in testing our actual honesty
and how we actually cheat. Of course, the good professor didn't use famous
murderers for the data for his thesis, relying instead on the unpaid, non-union
human laboratory rats of modern psychological studies, undergraduates at Duke
University. Ah, yes, our children.
Probably a
quarter of our colleges have a pledge that all freshman sign to uphold the
University Honor Code. We are told, as nervous 18 year olds, that we can take
our exams in any room of the campus at any time, but on our honor, we have to
sign on the front of our exam booklet that we took the examination in the
requisite time and that we didn't rely on any outside help.
On the
whole, let me state at the outset, that in the broadest aggregate, the research
about our moral behavior in general is quite good. The vast majority
of us actually do the right thing and want to do the right thing. This
would be true the vast majority of the time.
But, left to
our own devices, we have a depressingly consistent aptitude for cheating.
Professor
Ariely had a simple set of 10 matrixes that he had his students complete in a 5
minute test. They were a simple version of boxes of numbers that you had to
fill in to make the box add up vertically and horizontally to make it complete.
Now it was not possible to actually complete all 10 in 5 minutes as a couple of
them weren't solvable, a cruel twist of fate but it couldn't happen to a nicer
group than those little bastards at Duke University.
Now at the
end of the 5 minutes, the students were asked to write down their scores and
add up their correct scores. They were told that they would be awarded $1 for
each correct answer. The test was designed so that an average student could get
about 4-5 right out of the 10 in this time period.
Here's the
moral catch. Just after they finished adding up their totals, the proctor for
this experiment, a lax graduate student, told them that they should shred their
actual exam answer sheet so the next group wouldn't see it. Then he asked them
to just report how many they got right. Then they were paid on the spot.
How many of
the students reported getting all of the answers right, even though it was
impossible to actually get them all right? Only like 1 percent but there were a few and I can name one of them for you. His name is
Walter Offenhartz and he sat next to me in Chemistry class in High School and
he practices law in Portland today. But I'm over it.
Statistically,
the research is promising. The Bernie Madoff's and
the Jeffery Skilling's of the world that just nakedly lie, cheat and steal
their way through life, are rare. Alas, dear friends, so are those that report
their scores accurately left to their own devices.
The vast
majority of people exaggerated their score by a point or two. It is entirely
plausible that this ‘fudge factor' could simply reflect the fact that the
average Duke university graduate has an inordinate sense of self-regard,
evidenced annually at this time of year, listening to them brag about their
basketball team. Alas, the same results were replicated on campus after campus,
suggesting an alternative explanation. We are willing to lie to ourselves in
order to make us look better than we really are but only enough that we can
actually believe it ourselves.
We want to
cheat. But we also want to be perceived by others and by ourselves as being
good people, so there is a limit to what we are willing to do.
Our
researchers were mainly interested in the way that our group behavior
influences the moral latitude that we are willing to grant ourselves, so they
introduced a couple of variables. One of them was to have a student planted in
the group. After 4 minutes, out of a 5 minute examination, he stood up and
announced to the whole group, “I'm done and I got them all right, can I go
now?” Didn't you hate those people in college? Even today, I'd like to smack
them.
So most
students are sitting there, having just finished 3 or 4 questions and they know
there is no way this guy finished 10, no possible way. So does the presence of
a flagrant cheater in your midst make any difference?
The proctor
for the exam was instructed not to question the veracity of the blatant cheater
but simply to pay them their money. What do you think the research found? The
students actually cheated a bit more when they figured that there really wasn't
going to be any investigation into their ethics. Instead of exaggerating their
score by one or two, the averages increased to 1.5-2.5.
Conversely,
the researchers wondered if there was any efficacy to signing an honor code
pledge before you took the exam. Interestingly, they found that there was,
especially if you signed it before, not after, you took the exam.
It turns out
there is, especially if you have it followed up with a proctor that is
patrolling actively. When they introduced the test and told the students that
the exam fell under the same jurisdiction as all other exams and that the
University honor code would be strictly enforced and they had them sign it in
front of the proctor in a context where they were obviously being monitored,
incidences of cheating fell to nearly zero. People want to do the right thing
but they need encouragement and they need structure to rise to their higher
selves.
So culture
matters, as other researchers proved with a similar experiment done on the poor
students at MIT. In that case, researchers rigged a vending machine, so that
when you put your money in the machine you not only got your candy bar, your
money was returned to you as well. On the top of the machine, they pasted a
large sticker that you couldn't miss that gave a number to call if the machine
was broken. Nearby, a graduate student, looking very absorbed in his laptop,
recorded the student responses.
Almost
nobody actually called the number. In fact, the average student called 1.5
friends to come get some free stuff from the broken machine. Researchers
speculate that the indifferent context of having another student present who
seemed not to care in the least about what was happening contributed to a more relaxed internal moral latitude that students would
allow themselves in this context.
Similarly,
in a related series of studies, researchers found that we are generally able to
cheat more if we are in a context in which what we are stealing is abstracted
from us. When they posed a very similar study where students were asked to
actually take cash versus enter the amount they were owed on an ATM pad like we
use every day at the supermarket, guess what? Students were much more likely to
take more money on the ATM machine.
And here is
the thing, more and more of our life involves exactly that kind of abstraction,
like one of our annual exercises that we are all going through shortly, filing
our taxes with the IRS and self-reporting for a return, most likely, on-line.
Will Rogers
is probably right. He once said that the IRS has made more liars out of the
American people than the game of golf. And not in a huge way,
but in a legion of small ways… It is hard to imagine a more abstract
entity that we are willing to defraud than the faceless, nameless, arbitrary
bureaucracy of the Internal Revenue Service.
The moral of
the story is subtle but probably significant. The vast majority of people want
to do the right thing but they also need encouragement and a structure in
society around them that reinforces that behavior on a regular basis.
Professor
Ariely tells a story about needing a locksmith one time when locked out of his
house. The locksmith arrives and picks open the door in a couple seconds,
somewhat to his alarm, realizing how easy it is and how little deterrent the
lock actually is to a trained pro.
The
locksmith says to him, “One percent of people will always be honest and never
steal. Another one percent will always be dishonest and always try to pick your
lock and steal your television. And the rest will be honest as long as the
conditions are right- but if they are tempted enough, they'll be dishonest too.
Locks won't protect you from thieves, who can get in your house if they really
want to. They will only protect you from the mostly honest people who might be
tempted to try your door if it had no lock.”[ii]
Christians
have long recognized this which is why St. Paul says, “All have sinned and
fallen short of the glory of God.” Okay, perhaps Paul exaggerates himself. Only
99% of us have fallen but it is a pretty big chunk.
That is why,
when the Christians and those Deists who were strongly influenced by this
teaching of Christianity wrote the Constitution, they emphasized a balance of
powers. “In God we trust, all others pay cash. And all others must be
structured with some objective accountability.
“If power
corrupts”, wrote Lord Acton, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” We've proved
it time and time again in all monarchical or authoritarian forms of government
and we can prove it every day, left to our own devices.
But I would
like to put in two compelling words of encouragement for you gathered here
today because your very presence here is probably more significant than you
realize.
The sad
truth about dishonesty is that none of us is really able to tell ourselves the
truth about ourselves. That is why we need God. And not in the way that you
might think, as in checking in with God the Cosmic conscience that overrides
us.
Jesus taught
us that we are children of God in whom God is well pleased. Jesus taught us
that God love us and wants the best for us in our own skin. How few of us come
by that kind of self-acceptance naturally?
Indeed, from
the time we are small children, one of the main reasons that we exaggerate our
view of ourselves is that we really don't believe that we are acceptable as is.
We worry that we have to be more. We have to be smarter than our brother, more
disciplined than our older sister.
We spend
much of our competitive childhood trying to become someone that is bigger,
better, someone that is not who we are but who we think we need to become to win
the prize- the spouse we couldn't get otherwise, the respect that we wouldn't
garner otherwise, a whole host of things material and spiritual that we need to
earn in order to be worthy…
Most of our
lives is coming to grips with actually improving the one
job that God has really given each and every one of us, becoming authentically
ourselves. Most of our adult life is a painful process of figuring out that we
have been chasing dreams that were not really real, dreams that weren't good
for us. It is only as we start to see ourselves as God sees us, that we begin
to accept ourselves as God accepts us, and to develop genuine ways of living
and being that actually bloom who is resident inside of us all along. You are a
child of God in whom God is well pleased. Become yourself.
And Saint
Paul taught us that when the Spirit of God is genuinely moving in our midst, we
actually encourage one another in just this way.
But one of
the most beautiful things in life is when we are lucky enough to be surrounded
by people that really love us, especially if they not only care for us enough
to tell us the truth, but they can deliver that truth to us in words and
gestures that we can actually hear. We can actually become the Word of God and
the Presence of God for each other. We have that amazing ability to pick each
other up, make each other stronger, inspire each other to rise above the
foibles and dysfunctions that we inherited from the shrouded past and press
forward towards a new day becoming new people. We can literally release the
Spirit of God in our midst and watch the Spirit do its amazing transforming
work.
And on the
whole, our beloved researchers stand in envy and awe of what we do each and
every week in worship. It turns out that it is very important and no one has
yet figured out a way to replace what we do by calling us together as a
community to remind us of the values for the higher way of living. “Thou shalt not
bear false witness against thy neighbor.” It turns out that
hearing that weekly, repeating it to ourselves in prayer, are highly
effective. That is why, when we stand before Judge Grispin in court, the judge
will have us place our hand on the bible and repeat after him, “I swear to tell
the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” It
really helps us to rise to our higher selves to make a pledge, in public,
before our peers, to uphold the law of the land.
When we
gather each and every week, we remind ourselves by reminding each other, that
we intend to take the higher way. We want to stop the slide, to find genuine
acceptance, to remember who we are and what we are here to be about, to
encourage each other to rise to our higher selves and become genuine and
authentic.
We really
want to clean up our act every so often. We really want to turn again towards
the light. We really want to follow in the higher, fuller way, the way that God
wants us to be. So hear this today, Ignoscit tibi Deus, “God forgives you”. You are a child of God.
May you experience the freedom, the grace, and the deep confidence that comes
from being yourself and living out of your real identity.
And may you be privileged to inspire someone around you to become authentically
who they are meant to be. May you know the life of love.
Amen.
