On a recent morning, I took an Uber to visit Dan Ariely, a psychologist at Duke University and one of the world's foremost experts on lying. The inside of the car, though neat, had a strong odor of sweaty socks, and the driver, though courteous, had trouble finding her way. When we finally got there, she asked me smilingly if I would give her a five-star rating. "Sure," I replied. Later, I gave her three stars. I assuaged my guilt by telling myself that it was better not to mislead thousands of Uber riders.
最近早上，我乘坐Uber去拜訪杜克大學的心理學家丹·艾瑞里，他是世界上最重要的一位謊言專家。這趟行程中，雖然Uber車內部很整潔，但車廂里充滿了汗漬的味道，雖然司機十分禮貌，但總是找不到路。當我們最終到達那里的時候，她微笑著問我能否給她一個五星好評。“當然可以。”我回答道；下車后，我給了她三顆星。 為了減輕負罪感，我告訴自己這樣做避免了成千上萬的乘客被誤導，總比不說來得好。
Ariely became fascinated with dishonesty about 15 years ago. Looking through a magazine on a long-distance flight, he came across a mental aptitude test. He answered the first question and flipped to the key in the back to see if he got it right. He found himself taking a quick glance at the answer to the next question. Continuing in this vein through the entire test, Ariely, not surprisingly, scored very well. "When I finished, I thought—I cheated myself," he says. "Presumably, I wanted to know how smart I am, but I also wanted to prove I'm this smart to myself." The experience led Ariely to develop a lifelong interest in the study of lying and other forms of dishonesty.
大約在15年前，艾瑞里對不誠實著迷。他在長途旅行航班的雜志上翻到了一個精神狀態的測試。他回答了第一個問題，并對了書后面的要點，檢測他的回答是否正確。他發現自己會迅速地瞟一眼下一個問題的答案。這個過程持續在整個測試中，不出意料地，艾瑞里得到了不錯的分數。“當我完成的時候，我覺得我騙了自己。”艾瑞里說，“我大概想知道自己有多聰明，但同時我也很想證明自己是聰明的。”這個經歷使艾瑞里將終生興趣放在了對說謊和其他不誠實行為的研究中。
In experiments he and his colleagues have run on college campuses and elsewhere, volunteers are given a test with 20 simple math problems. They must solve as many as they can in five minutes and are paid based on how many they get right. They are told to drop the sheet into a shredder before reporting the number they solved correctly. But the sheets don't actually get shredded. A lot of volunteers lie, as it turns out. On average, volunteers report having solved six matrices, when it was really more like four. The results are similar across different cultures. Most of us lie, but only a little.
在他和同事在校園或其他地方進行的實驗測試中，被試需要回答20個簡單的數學問題。他們必須在五分鐘內盡可能多地解決問題，并根據正確答案的數量來獲取費用。他們被告知需要在報告正確數字前將紙張放入粉碎機。但其實紙張并沒有被粉碎。事實證明，很多志愿者都說了謊。志愿者的報告上顯示平均每個人解決了6個問題，但實際上更像四個。結果在不同的文化背景中是相似的：大多數人都會說謊，但一般都無傷大雅。
The question Ariely finds interesting is not why so many lie, but rather why they don't lie a lot more. Even when the amount of money offered for correct answers is raised significantly, the volunteers don't increase their level of cheating. "Here we give people a chance to steal lots of money, and people cheat only a little bit. So something stops us—most of us—from not lying all the way," Ariely says. The reason, according to him, is that we want to see ourselves as honest, because we have, to some degree, internalized honesty as a value taught to us by society. Which is why, unless one is a sociopath, most of us place limits on how much we are willing to lie. How far most of us are willing to go—Ariely and others have shown—is determined by social norms arrived at through unspoken consensus, like the tacit acceptability of taking a few pencils home from the office supply cabinet.
艾瑞里發現有趣的并不是為什么會有那么多人說謊，而是為什么人們不說更多的謊。即使提高支付給正確答案的報酬，被試也不會將欺騙上升一個等級。“我們給被試一個能偷很多錢的機會，但他們只會偷一點。有些東西阻止我們大多數人從頭到尾說謊。”艾瑞里說。據他所言，這是因為我們希望自己誠實，在某種程度上，我們將誠實內化為社會向我們教授的價值。這就是為什么，除了反社會者，大多數人對于我們愿意撒謊的程度都會有所控制。我們大多數人愿意到哪種程度呢？艾瑞里和其他人表示，這是通過不言而喻的共識而達成的社會規范來決定的，就像從辦公室供應柜里拿幾支鉛筆的默認可接受性一樣。
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