Is there any profession so disliked and distrusted as "politician"? Only 7 percent of poll respondents give U.S. elected officials "high" or "very high" ratings when it comes to honesty and ethical standards, according to the latest Gallup figures. That's on par with those paragons of dishonesty, car salesmen, and a step below telemarketers. The guys who invented credit-default swaps and bundled your home loan into mortgage-backed securities (you know, the friendly bankers at Lehman Brothers et al.)? They rank almost four times as high on the trustworthy scale.
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To be fair, it's not as if politicians haven't earned the reputation -- from Richard Nixon ("I'm not a crook") to George H.W. Bush ("Read my lips") to Bill Clinton ("I did not have sexual relations with that woman") to Anthony Weiner ("That's not my …"). No wonder, then, that in a U.S. election year with two relatively squeaky-clean men running for the White House, it's still fraught with rumors of hidden offshore bank accounts and fake birth certificates. And in a billion-dollar campaign with both sides spending lavishly on ads that accuse the other of dishonest dealings and spreading lies, it's hardly a surprise that we tend to think of elected officials as professional fabricators.
Yet when my colleagues and I conducted a series of experiments, we found that people on Wall Street were more than twice as likely to lie as those on Capitol Hill. Even after the financial crisis, they get a pass. Why? Are we focusing on the wrong bad guys?
Let's be honest. We all lie. We embellish our accomplishments to impress others and sugarcoat our insults to avoid offending them. We tell our wives they've lost weight, we say we're sorry when we're not, and we claim to be avid recyclers. And we lie to strangers, too, often without realizing it. University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman found that pairs of strangers meeting each other for the first time were much more inclined to lie to the other person than they realized. After reviewing video of their conversations with strangers, 60 percent of participants admitted that they told two to three lies in the first 10 minutes. Now imagine what a professional politician does on the campaign trail, where he might meet thousands of strangers every day.
In a number of experiments I've conducted over the years, I've found in general that very few people take full advantage of the ability to cheat -- mostly we just massage things a bit. We're not awful, immoral people, yet almost all of us want to gain from cheating. We're hard-wired to be competitive, and in experiments that create conditions where there's a presumption that others will fib, people cheat more.
The main culprit is rationalization. Forces that increase our ability to rationalize lying (such as when our peers are doing it, when we think the party we're deceiving is corrupt, or when we think our actions are for a good cause) serve to increase the level of dishonesty that we are comfortable with. But the forces that decrease rationalization (reminders of our moral obligations, realizing the consequences of our actions, and so on) have the reverse effect of decreasing our dishonesty. Funny enough, the fear of getting caught plays almost no role at all.
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