Given the opportunity to secretly lie in order to win a beautifully wrapped chocolate truffle, only 14% of participants did so. This was consistent across 16 countries ranging from Austria to India to Indonesia to Turkey to the U.S. Although these countries’ civic institutions vary widely in corruption levels, their citizens are basically alike in their low propensity to lie (Source: David Pascual-Ezama of Universidad Complutense Madrid in Spain).
Different than eating chocolate, what if you were hired to shut down a business division, and you could not tell workers, suppliers, and customers whom you knew depended on the business division for their own well-being? This context changes some decisions for many. If you are in a situation in which you don’t have any expectation that the person is telling the truth, this is called “epistemic suspended context” (Source: Context-Dependent Cheating).
After the enactment of strict anti-bribery legislation in the UK a few years ago, sales of British firms in corruption-prone regions of the world grew 6% more slowly than those of comparable European firms. This suggests that bribes are indispensable for doing business in certain parts of the world – again, a different context than chocolate (Source: Stefan Zeume, University of Michigan).
No one leaves the university wanting to lie. Everyone wants to do well…yet context may put leaders up against tough decisions. The question is, how do we make ethics stick so that no one becomes corrupt?
14% lie in a simple context, what about other business contexts?
