The Cheat Test
StoryIllustration★★★★Dan Ariely, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute Technology, conducted some tests on human behavior. In one experiment, the participants took an examination in which they would receive money for each correct answer. The participants didn’t know, however, that Ariely was not testing their knowledge but whether they would cheat.
He set up the test so that the groups thought it would be easy to get away with cheating. Prior to taking the exam, one group was asked to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could remember. To Ariely’s astonishment, none from this group cheated! But all the other groups did have those who cheated.
Recalling a moral benchmark made the difference.
The point
Dan Ariely's research found that recalling the Ten Commandments beforehand stopped people from cheating, showing the power of a moral benchmark.