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Why do we lie? Why do we act dishonestly and ignore our morals? We generally accept that we should avoid these behaviours. We often consider ourselves morally sound, perceiving self-serving dishonesty as negative. However, morality is not static; from time to time, we will misbehave.
Hi, my name is Jason, and I firmly believe that when dealing with other emotional beings, acting with 100 % honesty isn’t in anyone’s best interest. We lie; at times, we can lie to hide our vulnerabilities; this can be good as there are people who’d harm you if they knew your vulnerabilities. When we lie to shield ourselves from criticism, rejection, or disappointment, things take a more negative turn because we need these things to grow. Similarly, we lie to avoid difficult situations and the feelings they bring out of us, such as anxiety or guilt; we often find it challenging to deal with the emotions that stem from disappointing others.
Our willingness to commit a crime is also connected to these themes of dishonesty and morality. For some, it’s a balance of risk vs reward, others commit crimes regardless of consequences, and some avoid criminality irrespective of the consequences. Many dishonest acts can be linked back to a series of minor transgressions. Ignoring minor ethical lapses can escalate to more severe lapses in judgement. Emotional excitation can be observed even measured when people act to deceive; these signals are meant to discourage us from immoral actions; pharmacologically blocking these signals results in significant increases in dishonesty. The response to an emotion-evoking stimulus decreases with repeated exposure; the same goes for the signals meant to keep our behaviour in check.
We tend to lie, deceive and misbehave, and I want to analyze these behaviours from a more psychological perspective.
Dishonest behaviour is sometimes carried out in isolation, but most of the time, there is some connection to others. Our tendency to misbehave is affected by who we are with and the social consequences of acting dishonestly. When exposed to the dishonesty of others, you may change your assessment of the risk making you more likely to join in. Being with another person in a dishonest situation makes you more likely to misbehave or view the scenario as less problematic. Thankfully our peers’ misbehaviour doesn’t always make us want to get involved; their dishonesty may make you feel more strongly about your morals, decreasing your likelihood of deviance, but why? I think social identity has a lot to do with it.
Social identity has a lot of influence over our decisions, the people we’re surrounded with during the moment of decision-making, and who we allow to positively or negatively influence our behaviour. We’re more likely to join in when people close to us act dishonestly; these scenarios are marked by low social distance and a high association toward the “group identity”. In cases where social distance is higher, and there is a lower association toward the group identity, i.e. these are not your people, you’re less likely to join in.
We’re also likely to lie and cheat to level the playing field. In an interesting experiment, subjects were randomly assigned a low or high-income status by lottery; they then performed a task while an onlooker rated their performance. Their ratings affected earnings, so the onlookers decided how much the participants earned by under or overrating their performance. The onlookers tended to lie, underrating the high-income earners and overrating the low-income earners. This effect was even noticed when the initial income status was determined by effort instead of luck. Not only does this show an example of lying to level the playing field, but it also shows that when a lie influences the benefit of other people, we may draw social comparisons to determine the beneficiaries of the said lie. Social status and power dynamics are also important because people who feel like they’re in a position of power are more likely to falsely report that someone else performed a misdeed if there is a small incentive. (look at any police officer caught abusing their power on YouTube or social media, I shouldn’t need to say much more).
The mental effects that may influence our misbehaviour have also been studied. Cognitive depletion occurs when we’re tired, hungry, or constrained by demanding activities; it increases the likelihood of using our more automatic, subconscious response mechanisms to guide decision-making. During cognitive depletion, our ability to exercise self-control is compromised; not only does this make us engage in more cheating, but it makes us more likely to put ourselves in situations that’ll allow us to cut corners. Another well-documented cognitive bias is temporal discounting, a tendency to value things much more highly in the present and discount the effects our behaviour will have in the future. Temporal discounting reminds me of a family member who wants to borrow money and not pay it back; they’ll sacrifice a trusting relationship that can benefit them several times in the long term to get an immediate payoff. People prefer immediate rewards even if they have low overall value.
Around 1963, it was thought that the act of committing a crime could be explained by economic theory; the decision maker weighs up the pros of profiting from the crime and the cons of punishment, then decides on what to do using pure logic. This theory also comes with the thinking that to prevent crime, the penalties must be harsher, and the likelihood of getting caught must be higher. Also, an agent is expected to act dishonestly if there are no risks associated with the misconduct and will cheat as much as possible. More recent behavioural economists have tested and explored whether decisions to act dishonestly always follow this model. People are willing to cheat for personal gain, but not everyone cheats when they can get away with it or know they won’t be punished; and even when we cheat, we rarely do so to the maximum extent possible. When presented with the opportunity to act self-serving, most people prefer not to. Interestingly, it has been found that harsher punishments increase dishonesty in children and also mild penalties are more likely to inspire cheating than scenarios with no punishment.
In contrast to rational economic theory, in 1991, the idea of moral balance began to establish itself. This model argues that ethical decisions are weighed against a summation of honest and devious behaviours in our recent past, suggesting that moral identity is important to people and that moral choices are not influenced solely by cost-benefit approaches defined in the economic model. Instead, people will look at the moral activities they’ve performed within a given period and compare them to a lower limit, a personal standard; they will not stoop below. If someone has recently done a good deed, their moral balance is in surplus, increasing the likelihood of choosing self-serving behaviour elsewhere down the line. An unworthy act by a person who has recently behaved morally is evaluated less severely than the same act committed by someone with an immoral history. We deviate from moral behaviours so long as an overall balance is kept over time.
Closely related to the idea of moral balance is the notion of self-concept maintenance which came about in 2008. The idea is that people will act dishonestly if they can do so without having to update their self-perception (Self-concept) of being good/honest people. When it comes to dishonesty, we’re torn between two competing motivations: gaining from cheating versus maintaining a positive self-concept. As we grow up, we tend to adopt the norms and values of our society and community as part of socialization; this builds the framework for our moral compass.
Compliance with our moral compass activates the primary reward centre in the brain in the same way that money or food would; it is thought that this internal reward system regulates dishonest behaviour by influencing the way we perceive ourselves. If one fails to live up to their moral standards, they’ll be forced to view themselves negatively. Behaviours with malleable categorization allow people to reinterpret them in a self-serving manner. We can favourably reinterpret specific misdeeds to find rationalizations for them. For example, would you rather take a 10p pencil from a friend or take 10p from their wallet to buy a pencil? Both are pretty minor, I might take my friend’s pencil, but I’d feel much less comfortable going through their wallet, whatever the reason was. The latter act had a lower degree of malleability; it’s harder to carry out the action and not feel somewhat bad for what you did.
Attention to standards also matters; when we are mindful of our standards, we will adhere to a stricter set of behaviours, drawing more firm distinctions between honest and dishonest deeds. Similarly, in cases where our moral integrity is in the limelight, we’d pay more attention to our behaviour. On the flip side, few papers have tested whether people even update their self-concept after transgressing. The self-concept model has been criticized by researchers who instead concluded that feeling safe to cheat and strategically not cheating to the maximum extent is more important.
Moving away from self-concept maintenance, next up is moral disengagement, which describes how we’re able to engage in dishonesty without feeling guilty about it; it’s when we excuse ourselves from the ethical rules that we would apply to other people. So following this model, individuals tend to cognitively separate their morals from a foul act to justify engaging in it and make it easier to live with the consequences. This coping mechanism involves restructuring and reframing destructive behaviour to being morally acceptable without changing the behaviour or our moral standards. There are many ways we can do this:
- By making moral justifications (more in the next section)
- Using sanitizing language to dull the emotional severity of the immoral act.
- Contrasting our conduct with examples of more extreme behaviour so that our actions seem trivial in comparison.
- It can also involve displacing or diffusing responsibility.
- Disregarding or misinterpreting injurious consequences,
- Or straight-up dehumanizing the victim.
Self-serving justifications can be argued to cover most of the mechanisms influencing our misbehaviour; even the slightest hint of justification is enough to motivate self-serving behaviour. Having a positive moral balance or self-concept can be interpreted as self-serving justifications. These justifications are our process of finding reasons for questionable behaviour to make them appear less dishonest. They alleviate the threat to the moral self when one acts unethically, enabling one to profit from immorality whilst seeing themselves in a good way.
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