OMSI has an event called "Science Pub" in the Portland metropolitan area and other places in Oregon. In Hillsboro, this event is held once a month. This past Monday, the speaker was a professor of psychology and behavioural economics called Dan Ariely . He is famous as the author of books on human behaviour that would be deemed as "irrational" by economists. Dressed in a ferrari-red jacket and matching red shoes, he gave a fantastic and engaging talk to a packed audience at the Venetian Theater in downtown Hillsboro.
Among the things he talked about was how people cheat across different cultures. He first asked the members of the audience to raise hands if they were from outside the USA. There was a smattering of foreign people in the audience, and I was one of them, and we raised our hands. He asked the audience to keep their hand raised if we felt that people in our country cheated more than US Americans. It was not a surprise that most, if not all people in the audience who had previously raised their hand, kept their hand raised.
Next, he described a study done in a laboratory setting ( I don't remember if it was his group which did the study or if he was talking about research done by some other group), where people were given a number of mathematical problems to solve. None of the problems were too difficult. The test was designed so that no could get all the answers done in the short amount of time allocated to solve the problem. After the test, the test-takers were asked to shred their answer-sheet in a paper-shredder so that no one would really know how they had done (or so they thought!). The test-takers had to simply report the number of questions they had solved and would get paid for each answer solved correctly.
In reality, the experimenters were using a special shredder that only shred the margins of the paper, and kept the central portion intact- allowing the tallying of the actual number of problems solved with that reported by the test-taker. On average it was found that people inflated their scores from 4 to 6, and that 60-75% of people cheated. This held across many different countries where this test was administered-Israel, USA, Italy, China, Turkey, Colombia, Portugal, Germany!
Dan Ariely's explanation for this is that in an abstract situation people cheat in roughly the same manner across different cultures, and feel good about it. But then how does one explain the differences one sees when travelling in different places or the differences in corruption index for different countries?
According to him, cheating depends on the cultural context. He had the audience in splits with the mention that for the French, infidelity is not a moral question. In a similar vein, Japanese are thought to be paragons of self-control- a behaviour which is seen when they are standing in line, but in a Japanese bar, they do not exhibit the self-control and indulge in behaviour that would shock people from most other countries. The cultural aspects of the situation overrides the behaviour that would be expected from the person in an abstract setting.
I learnt a lot from his lecture, and will possibly blog about other areas covered by him in a different blog entry. I am grateful to my friend who told me about the lecture. If you are really interested in his works, you can read the books mentioned below.
Dan Ariely: wikipedia link: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely)
OMSI Science Pub: https://www.omsi.edu/sciencepubhillsboro/01272014
Books written by Dan Ariely:
-Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.
-The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
-The Honest Truth about Dishonesty
Among the things he talked about was how people cheat across different cultures. He first asked the members of the audience to raise hands if they were from outside the USA. There was a smattering of foreign people in the audience, and I was one of them, and we raised our hands. He asked the audience to keep their hand raised if we felt that people in our country cheated more than US Americans. It was not a surprise that most, if not all people in the audience who had previously raised their hand, kept their hand raised.
Next, he described a study done in a laboratory setting ( I don't remember if it was his group which did the study or if he was talking about research done by some other group), where people were given a number of mathematical problems to solve. None of the problems were too difficult. The test was designed so that no could get all the answers done in the short amount of time allocated to solve the problem. After the test, the test-takers were asked to shred their answer-sheet in a paper-shredder so that no one would really know how they had done (or so they thought!). The test-takers had to simply report the number of questions they had solved and would get paid for each answer solved correctly.
In reality, the experimenters were using a special shredder that only shred the margins of the paper, and kept the central portion intact- allowing the tallying of the actual number of problems solved with that reported by the test-taker. On average it was found that people inflated their scores from 4 to 6, and that 60-75% of people cheated. This held across many different countries where this test was administered-Israel, USA, Italy, China, Turkey, Colombia, Portugal, Germany!
Dan Ariely's explanation for this is that in an abstract situation people cheat in roughly the same manner across different cultures, and feel good about it. But then how does one explain the differences one sees when travelling in different places or the differences in corruption index for different countries?
According to him, cheating depends on the cultural context. He had the audience in splits with the mention that for the French, infidelity is not a moral question. In a similar vein, Japanese are thought to be paragons of self-control- a behaviour which is seen when they are standing in line, but in a Japanese bar, they do not exhibit the self-control and indulge in behaviour that would shock people from most other countries. The cultural aspects of the situation overrides the behaviour that would be expected from the person in an abstract setting.
I learnt a lot from his lecture, and will possibly blog about other areas covered by him in a different blog entry. I am grateful to my friend who told me about the lecture. If you are really interested in his works, you can read the books mentioned below.
Dan Ariely: wikipedia link: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely)
OMSI Science Pub: https://www.omsi.edu/sciencepubhillsboro/01272014
Books written by Dan Ariely:
-Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions.
-The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
-The Honest Truth about Dishonesty
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