As it turned out, our dots task showed the same general results as the matrix task, with lots of people cheating but just by a bit. Interestingly, we also saw that the amount of cheating was especially large for those wearing the fake sunglasses. What’s more, the counterfeit wearers cheated more across the board. They cheated more when it was hard to tell which side had more dots, and they cheated more even when it was clear that the correct answer was more on the left (the side with the lower financial reward).
Those were the overall results, but the reason we created the dots task in the first place was to observe how cheating evolves over time in situations where people have many opportunities to act dishonestly. We were interested in whether our participants started the experiment by cheating only occasionally, trying to maintain the belief that they were honest but at the same time benefitting from some occasional cheating. We suspected that this kind of balanced cheating could last for a while but that at some point participants might reach their “honesty threshold.” And once they passed that point, they would start thinking, “What the hell, as long as I’m a cheater, I might as well get the most out of it.” And from then on, they would cheat much more frequently—or even every chance they got.
The first thing that the results revealed was that the amount of cheating increased as the experiment went on. And as our intuitions had suggested, we also saw that for many people there was a very sharp transition where at some point in the experiment, they suddenly graduated from engaging in a little bit of cheating to cheating at every single opportunity they had. This general pattern of behavior is what we would expect from the what-the-hell effect, and it surfaced in both the authentic and the fake conditions. But the wearers of the fake sunglasses showed a much greater tendency to abandon their moral constraints and cheat at full throttle.*
In terms of the what-the-hell effect, we saw that when it comes to cheating, we behave pretty much the same as we do on diets. Once we start violating our own standards (say, with cheating on diets or for monetary incentives), we are much more likely to abandon further attempts to control our behavior—and from that point on there is a good chance that we will succumb to the temptation to further misbehave.
IT SEEMS, THEN, that the clothes do make the man (or woman) and that wearing knockoffs does have an effect on ethical decisions. As is the case with many findings in social science research, there are ways to use this information for both good and ill. On the negative side, one can imagine how organizations could use this principle to loosen the morality of their employees such that they will find it easier to “fake out” their customers, suppliers, regulators, and competitors and, by doing so, increase the company’s revenue at the expense of the other parties. On the positive side, understanding how slippery slopes operate can direct us to pay more attention to early cases of transgression and help us apply the brakes before it’s too late.
Up to No Good
Having completed these experiments, Francesca, Mike, and I had evidence that wearing counterfeits colors the way we view ourselves and that once we are painted as cheaters in our own eyes, we start behaving in more dishonest ways. This led us to another question: if wearing counterfeits changes the way we view our own behavior, does it also cause us to be more suspicious of others?
To find out, we asked another group of participants to put on what we told them were either real or counterfeit Chloé sunglasses. Again, they dutifully walked the hall examining different posters and views from the windows. However, when we called them back to the lab, we did not ask them to perform our matrix or dots task. Instead, we asked them to fill out a rather long survey with their sunglasses on. In this survey, we asked a bunch of irrelevant questions (filler questions) that are meant to obscure the real goal of the study. Among the filler questions, we included three sets of questions designed to measure how our respondents interpreted and evaluated the morality of others.
The questions in set A asked participants to estimate the likelihood that people they know might engage in various ethically questionable behaviors. The questions in set B asked them to estimate the likelihood that when people say particular phrases, they are lying. Finally, set C presented participants with two scenarios depicting someone who has the opportunity to behave dishonestly, and they were asked to estimate the likelihood that the person in the scenario would take the opportunity to cheat. Here are the questions from all three sets:
Set A: How likely are people you know to engage in the following behaviors?
Stand in the express line with too many groceries.
