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The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty [Hardcover]

Dan Ariely (Author)

4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

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Book Description

Publication Date: 7 Jun 2012

Fascinating and provocative, Ariely’s The Truth About Dishonesty is an insightful and brilliantly researched take on cheating, deception and willpower. Internationally bestselling author Ariely pulls no punches when it comes to home truths.

Previous titles PREDICTABLY IRRATIONAL and THE UPSIDE OF IRRATIONALITY have becomes classics in their field, revealing unexpected and astonishing traits that run through modern humankind. Now acclaimed behavioural economist Dan Ariely delves deeper into the dark and murky recesses of contemporary psychology, daring to ask the big questions:

What makes us cheat? How and why do we rationalise deception of ourselves and other people, and make ourselves ‘wishfully blind’ to the blindingly obvious? What affects our infuriatingly intangible willpower and how can we ‘catch’ the cheating bug from other bad apples?

If you’ve ever wondered how a whole company can turn a blind eye to evident misdemeanours within their ranks, whether people are born dishonest and whether you can really be successful by being totally, brutally honest, then Dan has the answers, and many more.

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Product details

Hardcover: 304 pages
Publisher: HarperCollins (7 Jun 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0007477317
ISBN-13: 978-0007477319
Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16 x 3 cm

Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (30 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 106,606 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

‘Anyone who lies should read this book. And those who claim not to tell lies are liars. So they should read this book too. This is a fascinating, learned, and funny book that will make you a better person.’
A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically and Drop Dead Healthy

‘Dan Ariely ingeniously and delightfully teases out how people balance truthfulness with cheating to create a reality out of wishful-blindness reality. You’ll develop a deeper understanding of your own personal ethics—and those of everybody you know.’
Mehmet Oz, MD; Vice-Chair and Professor of Surgery at Columbia University and host of The Dr. Oz Show

‘I was shocked at how prevalent mild cheating was and how much more harmful it can be, cumulatively, compared to outright fraud. This is Dan Ariely’s most interesting and most useful book.’
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan

‘A captivating and astute study […] In his characteristic spry, cheerful style, Ariely delves deep into the conundrum of human (dis)honesty in the hopes of discovering ways to help us control our behaviour and improve our outcomes.’ Publishers Weekly

‘Lucid and succinct as always […] Required reading for politicians and Wall Street executives’
Booklist

About the Author

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and the New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational. Over the years, he has won numerous scientific awards and his work has been featured in leading scholarly journals in psychology, economics, neuroscience, medicine and business and in a variety of popular media outlets, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, Scientific American and Science. He has appeared on CNN and CNBC and is a regular commentator on National Public Radio. He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife and two children.

Inside This Book (Learn More)

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Loved it: honestly! 25 July 2012

By Duncurin VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Great read, though I wonder if the book is more about temptation and whether dishonesty is one facet along a vast panoply of human experiences and emotion. Whether it's taking the big piece of cake or lying to millions in the House of Commons! Surely at one level or another we are all tempted, at times, and this book discusses the weakening and strengthening factors concerned with this process, along with many interesting examples.

Psychiatrists talk of 'protective factors', maybe thoughts about a loved one, which causes a patient intent on harming himself to stop. Temptation also has protective factors that we can call upon in that cusp of indecision. As a poor student, I lost my wallet running between trains at Birmingham. It was handed in complete and I have never forgotten my gratitude. A year ago when parking, my front tyre went over what turned out to be someone's wallet. I'm sure the devil would have reserved for me a nice warm seat if I had kept that wallet, but it would also have destroyed any positive emotion that I received from those experiences as a student, and rightly so too. Last month, here in Manchester, a man was coming from the bank with �1000 in his hand; he somehow tripped and the money promptly blew away. Sitting in his car a few minutes later- people started banging on the window in order to return the cash: 49, �20 notes were returned and my view is that those 49 people who acted in this way were enriched by that act; more so, than spending �20 that wasn't theirs, could ever have done.

I wonder therefore if it's important that we humans struggle with these dilemmas, if only because it enriches and 'validates' our lives.... Read more ›

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars An orderly deconstruction of our notions of dishonesty, but perhaps a little too lab-based 3 Aug 2012

By Dr. P. J. A. Wicks VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

Dan Ariely, author of the marvellous Predictably Irrational and thoughtful commentator on human foibles, presents his latest book as a comprehensive review of the factors affecting honesty (and cheating). As always, his writing is accessible, entertaining, and often humorous. Where this book differs a little from others I have read of his or that are in this field, is that there is a significant focus on a particular set of experiments that Ariely and his team have conducted in his lab. The task involves having participants complete a very difficult task but to allow them to take extra credit for completing more problems within the task then they actually did, with each new experiment given a slight tweak, such as the presence of a collaborator, an observer, or other influences such as being given fake designer sunglasses to wear. As a scientific method within social science, this is a very reasonable approach and this content would make an excellent and very entertaining review in a scientific journal.

However, for a popular science book I felt that continually coming back to minor variations on what is (as Ariely admits) a very controlled situation, limits the applicability of the findings somewhat. Perhaps this is a sparse field, but there seemed less reference in this book to the experiments of other researchers then I remember in books like Predictably Irrational. Another area where Ariely is most engaging is in his own life experiences and anecdotes, which peppered his earlier work but which seem more muted here.... Read more ›

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable, enlightening and only mildly annoying 13 July 2012

By Jonathan Gifford VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

I find Dan Ariely's books to be enjoyable, enlightening and mildly annoying, in equal measures. The mildly annoying bit is surely unfair (and unreasonable) of me. I do tend to find Ariely's determinedly jaunty tone a bit wearying: he writes as if his readers were a pleasant but especially dim-witted intake of undergraduates. This is probably the secret of his publishing success: as the great H. L. Mencken said, 'No one has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people' (you and me, in this context). I am also a bit resistant to the notion that things about the human condition with which we are entirely familiar cannot be taken to be really true until they have been 'proved' to be true by psychologists. Most of the simple but ingenious experiments of Mr Ariely and his fellows tend to confirm several facts about human nature of which we were, in general, already aware. I don't have a problem with that and I enjoyed reading the book. I doubt, however, if you will find that you have learned anything about human nature that you had not already learned from your own experience, and nothing that Ariely and his team 'discover' about our behaviour has not been rather more convincingly portrayed by our great playwrights and novelists.

Ariely, to be fair, sets out to write popular science, and he succeeds admirably, although - as ever with the genre - some of the science gets lost in amongst the popularisation. All of his experiments are thought-provoking, though some of his conclusions are more compelling than others. Some leave one wondering, 'Can we really draw that conclusion so emphatically from that data?...' Be that as it may, the ingenious tests seem to prove Ariely's central point: pretty much anyone will cheat if they think they are going to get away with it but that, nevertheless, 'most people cheat just enough to still feel good about themselves.' Our notion of ourselves as being decent and upright folk will only withstand so much evidence to the contrary.

Ariely enhances this core tenet with elaborations about social effects, all of which are interesting but few of which are earth-shattering (if we see that other people are cheating, we're more likely to join in, especially if they are part of our social set; if we feel we're being observed, we're less likely to cheat) and with some of those interesting but occasionally slightly dubious other conclusions: willpower is limited and can be depleted, and we are more likely to succumb to temptation when we have already forced ourselves to resist a number of previous temptations (on that analysis, how does anyone ever give up smoking?); wearing sunglasses that we know to be fake designer sunglasses makes us more likely to cheat ('the wearers of fake sunglasses showed a much greater tendency to abandon their moral constraints and cheat at full throttle'). The moral of this tale would seem to be never to ask a friend wearing fake sunglasses to look after your handbag in the pub garden while you go to the loo.

All that said, this is a jolly and informative romp through some genuinely interesting current psychological thinking, entertainingly and readably presented. I have to declare an interest at this point: one of the chapters in this book is called `Blinded by our own motivations' and, in another chapter, Ariely writes that, 'We may not always know why we do what we do, choose what we choose, or feel what we feel.' As the man who has written a book called Blindsided on exactly that theme, I cannot help but say, in this particular context, that Dan Ariely is clearly a deeply perceptive and highly intelligent chap (demonstrably so, since he agrees with me).

I do, however, have a few gripes. Ariely concludes, as a result of a particular set of experiments, that people with a particularly creative mindset are more likely to deceive than others: their enhanced 'story-telling' abilities allow them to be comfortable with various version of reality that may not exactly coincide with what you and I thought had actually happened. ('The more creative we are, the more we are able to come up with good stories about how we are doing the right thing, even when we are not.') But then the psychologists discover that one sees the same effect in people who have been merely 'primed' for creativity by being exposed to a number of carefully-chosen words in the course of the experiment: 'creative', 'original', 'novel', 'new' and 'ingenious', for example. Since Ariely is attempting to make a conclusion based on the fundamental structure of individuals' brains (creative people have more white matter in their noddles and are therefore able to 'make more connections between different memories and ideas' than other people) it seems a bit cavalier (and unlikely) to suggest that merely introducing the notion of creativity via a few words can reconstruct conditions that he had previously argued were the result of the intrinsic physical make up of some individuals' brains.

I also wonder what Ariely is even thinking of when he says 'So where do we stand on self-deception? Should we maintain it? Eliminate it?' I thought that everything that Ariely had said in the book up until this point (page 158) had made it pretty clear that we didn't have much choice in the matter. And Ariely seems to want to discover the 'function' of self-deception. One of his core conclusions is that 'self-deception is similar to its cousins, overconfidence and optimism' in that it can help us deal with stress, carry out tedious tasks and get us to try new and different experiences (if we didn't deceive ourselves, we would realise that we were doomed to either boredom or failure, or both).

My fundamental complaint is that Ariely seems to begin with the premise that all human beings are essentially honest and then to drop his carefully manufactured bombshell (We are all far less honest than we think!) on our unsuspecting heads. I'm also far from sure that self-deception has any kind of benign 'function', as Ariely suggests: as social animals, most of us are aware that mere anarchy is the route to social disaster, but that doesn't mean that we can't help ourselves to just a little bit of something that might technically belong to somebody else. As self-aggrandising idiots, we also think that we are capable of anything. This leads us (happily) to attempt things that we should realise that we are incapable of. As Ariely says, 'we persist in deceiving ourselves in part to maintain a positive self-image. We gloss over our failures, highlight our successes (even when they are not entirely our own), and love to blame other people and outside circumstances when our failures are undeniable.' That is a lovely summing up of a critical part of the human condition, but I am uncertain about Ariely's suggestion that we have any choice as to whether to deceive ourselves or not, or that self-deception is some kind of advantageous evolutionary pressure that helps us to cope with the realities of human life. I feel rather that self-deception is simply a part of the human condition and that we might be far more evolutionarily successful (but also far more boring) if, like the Vulcan, Spock ,from Star Trek, we didn't actually practice self-deception in the way that we do.

But I wouldn't be making these moans and gripes if Ariely's book hadn't set me off on a number of trains of thought. If you are interested in human behaviour and psychology, you will enjoy this book. Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Everyone has a story about a fudger.

This book explains why people cheat marginally and why they continue to do it. I took away a self improvement from this as I saw how hand waving chores impacted on my intelligence.

Published 22 days ago by Barry K Jackson

4.0 out of 5 stars entertaining but limited

This is an interesting and primarily entertaining book about dishonesty, what it means to be dishonest and in which circumstances people are exhibiting behaviour that would be... Read more

Published 1 month ago by Ioannis Glinavos

5.0 out of 5 stars great book

great author, very quick shipment. Dan Ariely is one of my favourite authors and his take on rationality and other human behaviours is something that makes one think. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Miss D. Najdenowa

5.0 out of 5 stars Straightforward

This book does not solve your life, but helps you to think laterally about the truth, which sometimes can be enlightening.

Published 1 month ago by nieves

3.0 out of 5 stars Ok, but not great

I came to this book via a presentation on RSA vision which I find very interesting. Being keen to learn more I bought the book. Did I learn more? Read more

Published 2 months ago by tonybaloney

5.0 out of 5 stars Only 1% of people are honest!

1% are dishonest, and 98% of us will get away with what we think we can.

Ariely is a highly entertaining academic looking what makes us tick and how our... Read more

Published 3 months ago by Fun and Games

5.0 out of 5 stars Dan Ariely Style

I bought this book after reading Dan's previous books and it completely met my expectations. His books are always interesting with plenty of experiments to prove his theories. Read more

Published 3 months ago by Jos�

4.0 out of 5 stars Insightful and counter-intuitive but somewhat disappointing if you...

If this is the first book you read by Dan Ariely, you will probably find it well written, entertaining, full of insights and counter-intuitive facts about cheating. Read more

Published 4 months ago by Marcelo Landivar

3.0 out of 5 stars Too scientific for most normal souls!

Rathe prefer to know why people being dishonest, don't need to read loads of scientific papers and research to find out! Read more

Published 5 months ago by Simon

4.0 out of 5 stars Very intersting

This book has plenty of practical insights into honesty and dishonesty, which make it very useful. There's even a handy reference chart on the back page which lists the factors... Read more

Published 5 months ago by Mr. Rob Collins

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