When congressman Joe Wilson stood up during a speech by President Obama and said, “you lie,” he could have been talking to all of us. While we are told to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, we seldom do. From corruption in our government, to test-score scandals, from elected leaders’ extramarital affairs to the Ponzi schemes of Wall Street, cheating and dishonesty are significant parts of our culture—and inescapable parts of the human condition.
That's the findings of
Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and the author of
The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves
. He's run experiments with some 30,000 people and found that very few people lie a lot, but almost everyone lies a little.
My conversation with Dan Ariely:
Click here to listen on your iphone or ipad
How many times have we made decisions just to keep our options open? How often have we acted irrationality, yet convinced ourselves that it was part of a larger, rational plan? It's often said that in the Radio and Television business, the ideal program delivers unpredictable events in very predictable surroundings. Human nature is such that we do want it both ways; uncertainty and adventure. Duke University Professor Dan Ariely, in his new book The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
, explains how irrational behavior influences every part of our lives and how our irrational behavior is both systematic and predictable.