My husband recently bought some items at a store and realized when he got home and looked at the receipt that the cashier didn’t scan one of his items. So a few weeks later, when he was shopping in that store again, he picked up the same item and explained to the cashier that since he inadvertently didn’t pay for it the last time, he wanted her to scan this item twice.
The cashier looked at him like he was crazy.
“You want to…. PAY for it?” she asked, thoroughly confused.
“Yes,” he said, as if being honest was the most logical thing in the world.
Apparently, it’s not.
A few years ago, Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, wrote a book called The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves. In it, he describes that after conducting numerous research experiments, he found that almost everybody lies or cheats a little bit, but still think of themselves as good people.
In other words, the reason the cashier was so baffled by my husband’s gesture to pay for something that he didn’t pay for earlier is because most people would never have come back to the store to pay for a missed item. In fact, most people probably would have considered the cashier’s mistake to be a lucky boon.
I understand the cashier’s incredulity, but it’s disheartening.
In one of Dr. Ariely’s experiments, researchers gave participants a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems and told them they would be paid $1 for each problem they were able to solve in 5 minutes. At the end of 5 minutes, the participants were told to put their papers in a shredder and then report how many problems they solved to collect their pay. What the participants didn’t know is that the “shredder” only shredded the edges of the paper, so the number of problems they solved could then be compared to what they reported.
More often than not, the participants fudged the number of math problems they solved to collect a few more dollars.
Dr. Ariely said, “Across all of our experiments we’ve tested maybe 30,000 people, and we had a dozen or so bad apples and they stole about $150 from us. And we had about 18,000 little rotten apples, each of them just stole a couple of dollars, but together it was $36,000. And if you think about it, I think it’s actually a good reflection of what happens in society.”
Sounds to me like we live in a world in which a small number of criminally-minded people are willing to cheat big, but the greater majority of people are willing to cheat a little… and probably go to bed at night with a clear conscience.
That’s sad.
I once heard someone talking about a how much he respected a local business professional, who, as he described, was “the kind of person who always does the right thing, especially when no one is looking.”
I now understand how great a compliment that was. Most people don’t care as much about being honest and ethical as getting away with as much as they reasonably can and still feel good about themselves. We live in a culture in which slight dishonesty is not only accepted, but considered normal.
That makes my husband completely abnormal.
And that makes me very proud of him.
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photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/85853333@N00/1410473814″>Pay Cashier</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>