Saturday, April 23, 2016

From a review of a recent book of Dan Ariely

"The experiment that crops up again and again through the book is a task to find numbers in a series of matrices. People then shred the answers before collecting payment based on how many the completed. Most people cheat a little, possibly because they can rationalise that they could have solved more, or had almost completed the next one. Few cheat to the maximum, even when it is clear they have the opportunity to do so......
One of the more interesting parts of the book concerned how increasing the degrees of separation from the monetary outcome increases cheating. Having people collect tokens, which could be later exchanged for cash, increased cheating. In that light, a decision to cheat in an area such as financial services, where the ultimate cost is cash but there are many degrees of separation (e.g. manipulating an interest rate benchmark which changes the price I get on a trade which affects my profit and loss which affects the size of my bonus), might not feel like cheating at all.....
As is the case when I read any behavioural science book, the part that leaves me slightly cold is that I’m not sure I can trust some of the results." From https://jasoncollins.org/2016/04/22/arielys-the-honest-truth-about-dishonesty/

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