Dr. Dan’s Experiment
Friday, March 14th, 2008Dan Ariely was Bob Brinker’s guest on Money Talk last weekend. Dr. Dan, as Brinker called him, is a professor of Behavioral Economics at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Dr Dan was pushing his new book Predictably Irrational. I am going to give a rough summary of one of Dr. Dan’s experiments for the book that I found interesting. He gave subjects a simple math test where the subjects would be able to able to figure out the correct answers but he made sure that the subjects did not have enough time to complete the tests. He then tested different variables to measure the impact of cheating. He had testers tell the subjects that they would be paid $1 for each correct answer. The first group: Once the time was up, they told the testers how many correct answers they got correct. On average these subjects reported they got 4 correct. The second group: Once the time was up, they shredded the tests and then told the testers how many they got right. They knew evidence would not be there to verify how many they got correct and said they got 7 correct.

