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in our work our lives ethical on the tension benevolence and honesty what we do is we look at deception a little
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differently than people have in the past we look at deception that sometimes can
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be helpful to other people we typically think about deception as selfish deception so I lie to gain some
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advantage at the expense of somebody else and we typically think of honesty is something that might be costly to me
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but helpful to others in our research we actually disentangle those two things we think about
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deception that can help other people and honesty that might be helpful to myself
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and may be costly to somebody else we really do this we separate honesty and deception from pro-social and pro self
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interests what we do is we find that people actually don't care that much about deception we find that the
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aversion to lying when people say don't lie to me what they really mean is don't be really
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selfish broadly the advice on the table until now has been you know always be honest
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honesty is the best policy we're suggesting that maybe we had revised that advice and make the statement lie
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sometimes the key takeaway is to understand when we should lie when does honesty actually harm trust seem immoral
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and when does dishonesty when can deception actually breed trust and be seen as moral so we could think
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about how that might be used in delivering feedback because managers often have to balance this tension
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between benevolence giving kind supportive feedback and honesty giving critical harsh feedback so we might
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suggest that managers actually err on the side of benevolence if their goal is really to promote trust and
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relationships what surprised us was that when we really separated dishonesty from
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selfishness we found that what's driving all of this behavior what-what people
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judge me moral or immoral when people trust somebody or they don't trust somebody we find that what really
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matters is how kind how benevolent somebody is and that deception plays a very small role that is when we tell
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people never lie to me what we really mean is don't be selfish we studied this tension between
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benevolence and honesty using economic games we had people come to a lab and watch someone or interact with someone
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who had an opportunity to lie about the outcome of a coin flip or a die roll some objective fact in order to make
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money for their partner so they could lie and be dishonest in a way that would help a counterpart and then we had
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participants judge this dishonesty versus truth-telling which would harm the counterpart and we found that when
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participants are lied to in a way that helps them they actually really appreciate that dishonesty it boosts
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trust and it causes them to think that their counterpart is moral also when they simply observe somebody who's lying
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to help someone else to earn someone else more money they also trust this person more I think this person is more
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moral than someone who is just always honest we ran three different experiments in
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our paper our Liars ethical and each experiment had about 200 participants so each experiment builds on one another
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the the first one just looks at lying to help someone else first being honest which harms others and then the second
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experiment which had another 200 participants looks at the effect of lying to help someone else even when it
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actually causes harm so we disentangle intentions from outcomes and then in our third
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experiment which again had another 200 or so participants we start to disentangle the role of the effect of
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lying on the self verse the effect of lying on others we think about interacting with other
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people it could be our customers it could be subordinates we're giving people feedback or we might be
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explaining why we're terminating a contract the the interactions we have with other people are often influenced
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not just by brutal honesty that we want to communicate but also important concerns about demonstrating the care we
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have for other people when we for example tell a client that we're gonna go with a different vendor sometimes we
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want to phrase things in a way that is different from the complete unvarnished truth we find is that we often really
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care about the benevolence that people signal through their communication and that's often more important than the
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harsh and complete truth so the advice here is to think about ways in which we might balance these two things and our
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findings suggest we want to tilt toward benevolence and we often do this intuitively and one key takeaway here is
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some of the codes of conduct some of the exhortation --zz we tell people when we
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say that honesty is a supreme concern or all honesty is always the best policy but what we're finding is that that's
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not really what we mean they're really two key ideas that that we have about new ideas for implementing
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some of these findings why does it change codes of conduct that is when we talk about codes of conduct and we have
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honesty in there for the sake of hypocrisy I would take that out because it's not what we mean it's not what we
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do and second when we think about training we think about the rules that we implement when we interact with our
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colleagues at work and our external clients we don't always strive to be completely honest it's not a core value
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really and our argument is to be consistent both in the codes of conduct and the way we train and teach other
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people so we want to think about the demonstrating concern and other elements of morality they're going to be really
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important in guiding the institution so I think ultimately we can become more consistent and less hypocritical when we
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think about the role and this tension between honesty and benevolence and how we don't always mean that the complete
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truth is what we're after I think instead of saying we should always be honest with others we should think about
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always treating others the way we'd want to be treated we should think about creating a caring
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community and we should think about this tension that is as we as managers as executives we want to think about
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balancing this in our training programs and we deal with other people and explicitly acknowledge that we're making
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trade-offs between honesty and care for others that's the key idea there are a lot of domains in which
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individuals face this conflict between honesty and benevolence very very intensely one examples in healthcare
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right so doctors frequently have to deliver very negative news to patients and actually prior research has found
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that oftentimes doctors do lie they inflate the positivity of these prognosis and we we seem to think this
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is bad and we and I think doctors feel a lot of tension and conflict around how to handle this situation but our
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research suggests that perhaps doctors and maybe teachers and parents should be explicitly acknowledging this tension
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and this trade-off and thinking about and talking about how to navigate it when might benevolence and kindness and
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maybe a little dishonesty be right or be appreciated and how could that enhance you know the delivery of medicine
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another case where we manage this balance between being completely honest and managing being benevolent is when we
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interact with children this is true as parents and it's also true as educators
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so teachers will need to give feedback to students and they have to balance this tension between being completely
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candid and being benevolent and kind demonstrating kindness and concern for the child as parents we frequently tell
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our kids never lie but that's not all what we mean for example before we go over to Grandma's house we might tell
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them say you remember thank grandma for that sweater and tell her how much you liked it even though we both know you
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never wear it for centuries we've been talking about honesty as a virtue and dishonesty as a
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vice so that's an idea that's been around in philosophy for centuries starting with Immanuel Contin actually
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before that but also empirically there's a wealth of research on deception documenting that deception harms trust
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that deception makes us angry the deception is immoral but these studies have really just looked at selfish
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deception it's the lies that we tell that hurt others and help ourselves we're trying to overturn this idea
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because we find that when we actually disentangle deception from selfishness people don't care all that much about
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dishonesty per se they really care about helping others so I think this the sheds
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new light on this idea that deception is bad prior work that studied deception has
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really confounded deception with selfishness what we know about deception is really we know about selfish
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deception and our work separates this out so we can actually learn about deception per se and we find is that the
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way we feel about deception itself is actually not all that bad and it challenges this enormous body of
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research that's made these broad claims about what deception does or doesn't do
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really what we know is what deception that selfish does or doesn't do so I'm really excited to look at the
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effects of pro-social lying how this tension between benevolence and honesty plays out in the feedback process how
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does it affect performance and how does it affect relationships when we give feedback I mean so a lot of people they
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might say that honesty is the way we improve honesty is important to get accurate feedback to become better you
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know employees better students but it's very possible that we need benevolence
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we need kindness sometimes we need dishonesty to be given the confidence to improve so benevolence and honesty don't
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only have effects on trust and character perceptions but might actually affect performance in organizations so I'm
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excited to take a look at that next you