Do the Right Thing

"Liar, liar, pants on fire!" Name-calling is not nice. And resorting to schoolyard taunts is surely not the way to make the world a better place. But a little bit of ego sting may not be such a bad thing. Reminding people of the link between behaving unethically and being an unethical person keeps people honest, suggests research led by UC San Diego's Christopher Bryan, assistant professor of psychology in the Division of Social Sciences. People want to think of themselves as ethical, according to many studies in moral psychology. And in order to engage in unethical behavior, people will often downplay their lapses and try to reconcile their not-so-great actions with their positive notions of themselves by engaging in self-talk along the lines of: "Well, a little bit of cheating - just here and there - doesn't make me a cheater." So what would happen, wondered Bryan and colleagues at Stanford University and the London Business School, if people couldn't let themselves off so easily? They ran three experiments to find out. In each case, people stood to win real money - and cheating would increase their take-home payout.