Business bookshelf: 'The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty'

We like to think of ourselves as honest. Yet in reality we all cheat, says behavioral economist Dan Ariely in his new book, "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty."

Our behavior reflects two conflicting motives, Ariely posits: We want to feel good when we look in the mirror, yet we also hope to benefit from cheating, he says, drawing on experiments with thousands of people. The upshot: We cheat just a little, not enough to dent our self-image, he says.

Picture a job-seeker padding a résumé. Or a Wall Street banker tweaking valuations on an Excel spreadsheet. We're all capable of fudging and telling ourselves stories about why our actions are nonetheless acceptable.

"Very few people steal to a maximal degree," Ariely writes. "But many good people cheat just a little here and there by rounding up their billable hours, claiming higher losses on their insurance claims, recommending unnecessary treatments."

Ariely has filled his book with amusing examples of how the cheating psychology plays out in everyday life. Office workers who wouldn't dream of taking $3.50 from petty cash will help themselves to paper for their home printer.

Golfers who hesitate to pick up and move a ball from a bad lie feel less compunction about nudging it with a club. Even your family dentist may be tempted to recommend a treatment that happens to require that fancy equipment he just bought.

Ariely and his colleagues explored these behaviors in experiments that offered students a chance to earn cash by filling out a mathematical worksheet. The more problems they solved, the more money they got. Though the experimenters did encounter some aggressive cheaters, it was the little chiselers who cost the most.

"Because there were so many of them, we lost thousands and thousands of dollars to them -- much, much more than we lost to the aggressive cheaters," he writes.

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