Try to board a plane before their group number is called.
Inflate their business expense report.
Tell their supervisor that progress has been made on a project when none has been made.
Take home office supplies from work.
Lie to an insurance company about the value of goods that were damaged.
Buy a garment, wear it, and return it.
Lie to their partner about the number of sex partners they have had.
Set B: When the following lines are uttered, how likely is it that they are a lie?
Sorry I’m late, traffic was terrible.
My GPA is 4.0.
It was good meeting you. Let’s have lunch sometime.
Sure, I’ll start working on that tonight.
Yes, John was with me last night.
I thought I already sent that e-mail out. I am sure I did.
Set C: How likely are these individuals to take the action described?
Steve is the operations manager of a firm that produces pesticides and fertilizers for lawns and gardens. A certain toxic chemical is going to be banned in a year, and for this reason is extremely cheap now. If Steve buys this chemical and produces and distributes his product fast enough, he will be able to make a very nice profit. Please estimate the likelihood that Steve will sell this chemical while it is still legal.
Dale is the operations manager of a firm that produces health foods. One of their organic fruit beverages has 109 calories per serving. Dale knows that people are sensitive to crossing the critical threshold of 100 calories. He could decrease the serving size by 10 percent. The label will then say that each serving has 98 calories, and the fine print will say that each bottle contains 2.2 servings. Please estimate the likelihood that Dale will cut the serving size to avoid crossing the 100-calorie-per-serving threshold.
What were the results? You guessed it. When reflecting on the behavior of people they know (set A), participants in the counterfeit condition judged their acquaintances to be more likely to behave dishonestly than did participants in the authentic condition. They also interpreted the list of common excuses (set B) as more likely to be lies, and judged the actor in the two scenarios (set C) as being more likely to choose the shadier option. In the end, we concluded that counterfeit products not only tend to make us more dishonest; they cause us to view others as less than honest as well.
Fake It Till You Make It
So what can we do with all of these results?
First, let’s think about high-fashion companies, which have been up in arms about counterfeits for years. It may be difficult to sympathize with them; you might think that outside their immediate circle, no one should really care about the “woes” of high-end designers who cater to the wealthy. When tempted to buy a fake Prada bag, you might say to yourself, “Well, designer products are too expensive, and it’s silly to pay for the real thing.” You might say, “I wouldn’t consider buying the real product anyway, so the designer isn’t really losing any money.” Or maybe you would say, “Those fashion companies make so much money that a few people buying fake products won’t really make a difference.” Whatever rationalizations we come up with—and we are all very good at rationalizing our actions so that they are in line with our selfish motives—it’s difficult to find many people who feel that the alarm on the part of high-fashion companies is of grave personal concern.
But our results show that there’s another, more insidious story here. High-fashion companies aren’t the only ones paying a price for counterfeits. Thanks to self-signaling and the what-the-hell effect, a single act of dishonesty can change a person’s behavior from that point onward. What’s more, if it’s an act of dishonesty that comes with a built-in reminder (think about fake sunglasses with a big “Gucci” stamped on the side), the downstream influence could be long-lived and substantial. Ultimately, this means that we all pay a price for counterfeits in terms of moral currency; “faking it” changes our behavior, our self-image, and the way we view others around us.*
Consider, for example, the fact that academic diplomas hang in many executive suites around the world and decorate even more résumés. A few years ago,
