The Cheater’s High And Other Reasons We Cheat

NPR:

This week on Hidden Brain, we take on cheating.

Lying and deception are part of being human. And it begins from a very young age. In fact, YouTube is filled with videos of imaginative children trying out little lies, usually to get out of trouble. We at Hidden Brain were taken with this brother/sister duo, Jackson and Reagan, as their mom interrogated them to find out who marked up the wall.

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Professor Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School has found in her research that people tend to be more forgiving of unethical behavior if it is creative (or in this case, cute). This is something she’s also found in her own life as the mother of a 3-year-old.

“I find myself looking at my son sometimes deceiving me, telling me the light on his alarm clock is on when I know that it’s not,” she says. “And I want to reward the creative excuses and descriptions of his behavior. But at the same time I feel like it’s deception and it should be punished.”

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