Is your company culture corrupt?

Can one person’s unethical behavior be enough pressure to influence an entire workforce or industry into acting dishonestly or even outright cheating?

To find out, Dan Ariely, professor of behavioral economics and psychology at Duke University, set up a corruption experiment to see if he could quantify dishonesty. The results are as shocking as they are fascinating.

An experiment is set up in which a participant sits down with a research assistant and is told that they will be rolling a die and getting to keep, in dollars, the number that they roll. They are instructed to choose the top or bottom number before the roll lands- but they don’t tell the researcher what they’ve decided. So, for example, if the die lands with a 1 on top there is a 5 on the bottom. If the subject had chosen “bottom” in their mind prior to rolling, they had no moral issue. If the subject had initially chosen “top” — he now had to decide whether to be honest and take $1 or lie a little and get $5.

Before the study begins the research assistant tells the subject that he will flip a coin to determine his maximum amount of earnings- either $4 or $40. Every participant loses the coin toss. When this happens, the research assistant looks around secretively and then divulges that his boss is out of town that day and if the participant will give him $3, he will mark it…