I wrote this Musing before Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Wednesday. I have read a number of beautiful and meaningful reactions to that tragedy which speak what is in my heart. The United States–and the world–is a darker place today.
Thirteen years ago, as Professor Dan Ariely was awaiting the publication of his book, The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone, he wrote an article summarizing some of his findings. He asserted that while acts of mass embezzlement or egregious public falsehood provoke censure, almost all of us lie and cheat in smaller ways. We might inflate or deflate our income, exaggerate our accomplishments, or (my own addition to his words) insincerely compliment someone we care about while still considering ourselves to be upright, honest individuals.
In an amazing “coincidence,” his article surfaced from my largely ignored “one day I should relook at these” folder just after I read about a new study published in the Financial Times. That study concludes that conscientiousness—defined as a combination of honesty and self-control —in teens and young adults has starkly declined in the last decade.
The juxtaposition of the current study and the dated article intrigued me. One of the experiments Dr. Ariely and his colleagues conducted measuring the honesty of students revealed fascinating results. Having standardized a way to compare how they rated themselves on an undertaking vs. how well they actually completed the task, the researchers then added a twist. Before beginning the exercise, half of the students chosen from a secular college were told to recall the Ten Commandments while the other half were told to recall ten books they had read in high school. A variation had half the students recalling the Ten Commandments vs. the other half being reminded of the school’s honor code. A third version ran the same experiment on students who identified as atheists.
Are you shocked to hear that the students who reviewed their high school reading or their school’s honor code showed no difference in cheating from those who had no such introduction before the main test? Those students who reviewed the Ten Commandments had a strikingly different outcome. They didn’t cheat at all.
Judging by the recently released study highlighting the decline in conscientiousness among youth, similar studies today could have less sharply defined differences. Sadly, thirteen years down the road, the Ten Commandments will resonate in the souls of fewer young people.
We can assume that the threat of punishment or exhortations to play fair will continue to have less impact than appeals marinated in religious morality. Since conscientiousness is strongly correlated with future life success, publicly degrading traditional Judeo-Christian religious virtue with the result of diminishing the value of honesty leaves our young people less likely to have abundant, joyous, and productive lives today.
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