 Okay, so let's go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone. Good afternoon for those of you who don't know me. I'm Dr. Polly Shank Karin, and I am the Stockdale Chair in Professional Military Ethics in the College of Leadership and Ethics, and I'm joined by my colleague Thomas Gibbons, who is also a member of that department, works with our provost here. And this, Lou, today is part of a series on leadership and ethics that we're having throughout the spring. So some of you may have joined us yesterday for August Coles Talk, and there'll be conversations in March and April as well. So today we're really blessed to have Dr. Christian Miller from Wake Forest University in North Carolina with us. This is his second time at the Naval War College. He spoke to our Stockhill Leaders Group about his book, Character Gap, which if you're interested in ethics and want an accessible read, highly recommend that book. But yes, it's right there. And we had a faculty reading group on it last year as well. And so it's a great sort of place to start and a great conversation starter. But this morning, well, this afternoon, sorry, he's going to talk about some of his newer work, which is on honesty. And of course, honesty is something that's important to all of us who teach military and civilian leaders here at the Naval War College. And so looking forward to his conversation. So he's going to talk probably for about 45 minutes. And then my colleague Tom Gibbons is going to moderate discussion. So as the time draws near for discussion, if you would put your questions or comments for Dr. Miller into chat, that that would be helpful. So I'm going to turn it over to Christian. Welcome. And thank you for joining us. Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that introduction. It's great to be back. I've had a great time last year with that with discussing ethics and character, and I'm really looking forward to our conversation today about honesty. I should say right off the bat, I'm, I'm a civilian and and I'm not, you know, not very knowledgeable about the military world. So I'm going to be talking about honesty from a philosophical and psychological perspective, but I don't have the toolkit to make the connections to a lot of the challenges you're facing. So I really hope that you'll make those connections during our discussion and we can, we can investigate what I'm saying might be relevant and helpful for the challenges you're facing when it comes to matters of dishonesty. I also want to say, I have a handout. This is optional everything I'm going to be using a PowerPoint slide so you can just follow along with the PowerPoint if you like but if you'd like to have a handout to take with you afterwards to write notes on or anything like that. I'm going to now put the link to the handout in the chat. You can go to that website. And you'll see right there on the website, a link to the handout you can download as a word documents. Again, it's completely optional. Everything on the handout is also going to be in the slides. But if you are like me you'd like to have something to look at and to take with you later and ponder and click back on. Then that's a resource. Okay, I'm going to share screen. Does that look okay. All right, good. So let's get started. I'm going to talk about three main issues. As you can see from the title what is honesty are most people honest and how can we become more honest. It's going to be a lot of, I've got a lot to say, so I'm going to be trying to be cognizant of the time and as we go along may skip some things just to be sure to reserve some time for question answer. I think really interesting and important and controversial ideas to share with you. Now let's see, here we go. So I think it's not hard to motivate interest in this topic. The honesty and dishonesty are in the news all the time. I was thinking of choosing some contemporary examples but then I thought I might ruffle some feathers or make some people annoyed right from the start so that's probably not a good idea so I'll go back a little bit. Maybe there's a famous example. There's a famous example. You don't know who those people are maybe you need to ask your, your student like, you know, undergraduate students or kids or something like that but that's a famous example in some circles, made off can lay the head of Enron winner. Ashley Madison site. You can come up with plenty of other examples I mean today, everything from the college admissions cheating scandal that happened to Sally the West Point shooting scandal that's very very recent in the news to. I'm sorry, what's other examples make honesty always I think very timely and relevant topic to talk about. So I never have any trouble getting people wanting to talk about this. The problem though is that move along. It's the philosophers and the psychologists and the researchers who have done very very little work on honesty there's almost nothing written in the contemporary academic research on the virtue of honesty. To give you a sense, Aristotle, the hero of talk of character and virtue in the West doesn't have honesty on his list, it doesn't appear he has something somewhat related but not honesty and contemporary philosophy there hasn't been a book written the last 50 years, no added volumes and just two or three articles in the last 50 years and entire discipline of philosophy on honesty. This led us to think by us, I mean myself and some of other people at Wake Forest University that we need to try and change things we need to get people paying more attention to honesty at a scholarly level and academic level and hope that that will also trickle down to a more popular level to. So in August of this year we launched what's called the honesty project you can see it there at the websites there to trying to incentivize researchers who chip their research in the direction of honesty, both philosophers and people who doing empirical research, we are funding $1.8 million in new scholarship on honesty, as well as doing a whole bunch of stuff at our conferences, summer seminars, writing projects of our own here at Wake Forest. So if that's of interest, please check out my own research for the last few years has not surprisingly been on honesty as well and so what I want to share with you is some of my early thoughts. Something to revision and you can tell me where you think I go wrong. So I've got about a series of maybe six or seven topics I want to cover and see what you think about these ideas. So to start off with some background, I'll make some some distinctions like a philosophy does. So I'm going to focus not primarily on actions which we can describe as honest, like Smith did the honest thing and telling the truth on the stand in the courtroom. And I'm not primarily going to focus on momentary thoughts, which we can describe as honest. So if Jones carried out a thorough and honest assessment of the evidence in the case. I want to focus on statements like these. Roberts is not as person. I spent time with him to know that he's really dishonest, and he don't want to be his friend. And her honesty really stands out in her application, we should definitely hire her. In other words, I want to focus on the virtue of honesty understood as a character trait. The virtue of our character that gives rise to that leads to thoughts, and subsequently to actions, but it's ultimately traced back to who we are fundamentally as a person, our character. Okay, so that's my starting point, the virtue of honesty understood as a character traits. Well, that doesn't take us very far. So let's get to another question. What does honesty cover what ground does it cover what does it pertain to what issues. Does it apply to. Well, here are some possibilities, you can say well, one thing it does is honesty stops lying. Someone who reliably tells unjustifiable lies is not someone we would tend to call honest. That seems pretty safe. I don't think that's too controversial. You also think it covers misleading. That's different from line. So someone who misleads with holds important information tells have truths, something like that so I'll give you an example. The pose a spouse comes back from the bar. He was at the bar last night and the next day, his wife says, Where were you and he and the guy says, Well, I was at the bar last night. Well, that's true. But that's not the whole story. He neglected to say where he was after the bar last on purpose. You hold it. He told told a half truth and withholding important information. That seems like it's dishonest. It's a failure of honesty, something honesty should pertain to as well. But he could even go broader and scope the net. You could say it applies to stealing. Someone who reliably steals. Maybe it's not someone we would call honest might also apply to cheating. Someone who regularly cheats at games or other games where cheating could come into play. It's not someone we would call honest, maybe even promise breaking as well. Someone who regularly breaks reasonable promises we might call honest. This is not exhaustive list. There are others you put down here you could put down things like hypocrisy being a hypocrite self deception bullshitting awesome fraud. There are five central aspects that seem to fall under the purview of honesty and dishonesty. Now already this might be controversial you might say hold on Miller, you've already gone astray. So it's true that one way to think about this is that honesty pertains to all five of these. I don't know, but another way to think about this is that honesty pertains just a matter of lying and misleading. And at the other three cheating stealing and promise breaking have something to do with another virtue, another box. My own way of thinking about is I go broad here. I think honesty cast cast a broad nets covers a lot of moral territory. One of the reasons why it's such an important virtue. So I'm going to be operating under the assumption that all five of these have to do with honesty and dishonesty. Nothing will really hang on that if you disagree with me and you think it's narrower. I think a lot of why I have to say will still be relevant. So if you think it's those five areas that are the bad sides here are the five areas which are the good sides of corresponding good sides, truthfulness, the virtue of being disposed to reliably tell the truth when appropriate. Yes, reliably avoid giving misleading answers. So that's the opposite of that that misleading vice I was talking about being respectful of property. That's the opposite of the stealing proper obedience that's the opposite of the cheating and fidelity to promises well that's self explanatory from the name. You might think, look, there are five areas where there we could go wrong, or we could do go well we could excel we could display excellence. And if they all have to do with honesty, I say, they're all different facets or aspects of honesty. And that leads us to a really fundamental question of well what is it that unites them unifies them that connects them. It's the core of honesty so that honesty has its kind of, you know, the fingertips or its tentacles or whatever you want to analogy I use stretching out so far into so many different areas of morality. Why do all these arrows point to honesty. The unification challenge. I'm the only one as far as I know is tried to tackle this and answer it. And I think it's a really challenging question that's why I called the unification challenge. I'll give you an answer. So we come to the third topic for today. The nature question by nature I mean what is the nature of honesty. What is honesty at its core is hard what is it was the heart of being honest person. It could be a good proposal. Now this could be, you know, very implausible could be there are other good proposals out there I love to hear them, but this is what I have to offer for now. I say the virtue of honesty is centrally unreliably a character trait concerned with not intentionally destroying the facts as the person sees them. For people are coming late. There's a handout is completely optional. The link to it is in the chat. So what does this mean. There's a lot that needs to be unpacked here. Reliably. Well, if you're an honest person you can't just be honest in one situation. You don't get to kind of as I asked just by being honest in the courtroom, but nowhere else, or in the classroom but nowhere else. Your honesty has to exhibit cross situational consistency you have to be consistently honest across a variety of situations where honesty can come into play. The office, a courtroom, a party at home at work, and this and so forth, and reliably over 10 can just be a one off today but never again. You want to see a consistent pattern of honesty over time. Distorting. I mean by that. Not. I'm sorry. I mean misrepresenting. Another way to think about as misrepresenting so the honest person does not misrepresent the facts. Avoid doing that. And I'll give some examples and I'll clarify some more. But that's another way to think about this misrepresenting distorting intentionally. I mean this, they don't do this on purpose. Sometimes accidents can happen. You're in a shop. I don't know if this ever happened. And, you know, accidentally, you walk out with something that you didn't purpose you didn't purchase. So, you know, pocketbook, an orange falls into a pocketbook later you open up the pocketbook and discover the orange inside. You're not being dishonest. That wasn't on purpose it was just an accident that I fell into the pocketbook. I'm talking about here though, is not intentionally doing it on purpose. And then finally, the facts. So now I need you to think about your own intuitions here this is going to be given the example. And see how you intuitively react to it I can't do I do what do if this is in person where I'd ask you all the razor hands and see if you agree or not but at least ask yourself this. Here's an example. Here's the facts. So the flatter society. There is such a thing. There are members, they have a similar to a voice, and they believe that the earth is flat. Hard to, hard to understand but that's what they believe. So, hypothetically supposed Samantha sincerely believe that the earth is flat one day she's asked by a friend about the shape of the earth, and to keep her own beliefs as secrets. Samantha tries to mislead her friend and replies that the earth is round. She succeeds, and her friend now assumes that Samantha believes the earth is round. Was Samantha being honest. I say no. We interested in your intuition could tell me later, you agree with that. Even though she's telling what is objectively true, which is that the earth is round, even though she's saying something that's objectively true, you're this round. She's not being honest. In contrast, suppose instead of Samantha's forthright, she tells her friend that she believes that the earth is flat, and has no intention to mislead her friend at all. What's your intuition there. Well my intuition there is that she's being honest, even though her belief and what she's saying is radically mistaken. She's still being honest really she's not being dishonest. That shows to me that honesty tracks more what you think rather than what's reality, what is in reality what is reality is actually like. If you're representing what you think accurately, you're being honest. If you misrepresent what you think, then you're being dishonest. If you misrepresent what you think happens to be a correct truth. If you misrepresent others, you're being dishonest. You get all kinds of interesting possibilities. You have true belief and a true assertion that leads to honest action that's no surprise. False belief and a false assertion can lead to honest action. That might be a little surprising. You can believe something falsely and make a false claim and still be honest. That's what Samantha does in the second example. She believes that the earth is round. I'm sorry, believes the earth is flat, and she reports that the earth is flat. She's being honest about her belief. You have a false belief and make a true assertion you can tell the truth and still be dishonest. You can have a true belief and a false assertion and be dishonest. Let's see the upshot of this. So let's go back for a second. That's why I say it's not intentionally distort the facts as the person sees that. So you can be a conspiracy theorist and be honest on this definition you can be a doomsday apocalyptic person and be honest. You can be a flat earther and be honest. You might have forecomings in other areas of your life, you know, flaws in other areas. You got to fix some other problems maybe. But honesty is compatible with even those positions. Okay. I'll give you some more, give you some more examples online. How's this go and honest person reliably does not intentionally distort the facts as she believes them to be by telling lies about those facts others, especially if those lies are more than just every day or white lies. So suppose Smith tells his friend here I'm sorry teacher and ask friend to tell the teacher that the dog ate his homework dog didn't eat his homework, trying to pull a fast one on his teacher. What is he doing. He's intentionally distorting the facts. Right. He's trying to get a teacher to believe something that doesn't correspond to how he believes what actually happened. And that's the case of lying and that's going to be a failure of honesty for me. Similarly stealing, not as person would not would not intentionally distort the facts, as she believes them to be by stealing property that she believes belongs to another and thereby trying to make it the case that belongs to her. Trying to make it her property or his property. Here's another example I get I would ask you for this is in person for a show of hands to tell you to tell me whether you have the same intuition that I do about this example but maybe you just tell me afterwards now. Here's a thing about this one Timothy is missing his brand new notebook at school and spies when it looks just like it on top of another students desk. When no one is looking takes a notebook writes his name on top of it starts using it to do his homework. I'm going to us to him. This is actually his original notebook that he'd absolutely mindedly left in the wrong place. Yesterday. I think Timothy is failing to be honest that even though he didn't steal something that belonged to someone else even though it's his notebook. I realize that he's intentionally destroying the facts as he believes them to be. He counts as failing to be honest. All right, maybe I got on enough about that. Let's get to a fourth question. So we talked about behavior. But there is another side to character and that's motivation. I want to say for honesty, behavior matters but so does motivation. I give some arguments for that. We interest of time I think I'll pass over. If you if you doubt what the motivational requirements just ask me afterwards and I can say why I think motivation is important. Here we go. The virtue of honesty is centrally lively and character trade concern for good or virtuous motivating reasons. In other words your heart has to be in the right place. You're telling the truth. Not cheating not stealing and so forth. But for crappy reasons to use a technical term and philosophy. No, that's not like philosophy. For bad reasons. That doesn't get to you to honesty, you don't get to count. You got a heart in the right place as well as outward expression of behavior. So if you're telling the truth, simply to make a good impression on someone else. Or if you're not cheating on the test. Just so you can avoid punishment. Or if you're doing whatever on his action to try and get a promotion. Or if you're telling the truth simply to make a good impression on someone else. Or if you're not cheating on the test. Just so you can avoid punishment. Or if you're telling the truth simply to make a good impression on someone else action to try and get a promotion. Or avoid a demotion, or whatever it might be. That's all self interested that's about you you're doing it to benefit yourself in some way, or prevent yourself from being harmed in some way. Let's off the table. As far as being a virtuous reason for action. Of course, it's not saying it's ever wrong. It's fine, of course to be a self interested. If you want to attain the level of being a virtuous person in general. And in particular the level of being a virtuous person when it comes to honesty, self interested motivating reasons are going out. Otherwise, I think we can go in a variety of different directions I'm not going to be really Milton about this. I'm a pluralist about motivation. What I mean by that, let's approach it more tangibly less less theoretically. Let's talk about the truth about your past business failures, what it would have been so much easier to lie. Well someone says he deserved to hear the truth. That's fine with to me. Someone says I don't lie to my friends. That's fine with me to me too. Someone says it's important for us to be able to trust each other. That's fine too. I would not have been honest. That seems to me fine too. These are four very different reasons were different answers you could give. But I would be reticent to say that only one of them counts. I think we can let a lot of different options. Stay on the table for honest motivation. Another example, why didn't you do a test when you could have gotten away with it. The answer is, why didn't want to get run the risk of failing out of Wake Forest. That's not going to count that self interested. But the answer is, that would not have been fair. I don't want to did want to respect Professor Miller, of course, then you get a day in the class but not just joking with that. That's a great answer. What if everyone were to sheets. That would be it's terrible world to live in. It would not have been honest. Again, four different answers that seem fine to me. I wouldn't want to exclude anything. Why didn't you break didn't you break the painful promise. I loved him. That seems fine to me. Loving but for honesty. Now consider this alternative. I owe it to him. Why didn't you break the promise. I owed it to him. That seems fine too. Justice motive for honesty. So what do we get we get pluralism here. Loving ultimate motives. They're fine. Justice ultimate motives friendship ultimate motives. Beautiful ultimate motives honesty ultimate motives because it would have been dishonest or would have been honest. All these seem to be to be perfectly legitimate. Examples of what can count as honest motivation in an honest person. But I think we can see a way to reduce them all down to one fundamental motive for honest behavior. So I let it all just stay like that. I let 1000 or however many different kinds of our flowers bloom. And I go from there. That's the official view. I think we've done enough philosophy. Let's get into something else. Vice, I will skip over in the interest of time. I think you can ask me about the vice of deficiency and the vice of excess for honesty. Feel free, we can talk about that later if you like. But I do think I need to try and hit the highlights at least and cut some things to make sure we have time for q amp a. So let's go to the possession question. Now philosophy. Let's get our hands dirty in empirical data from psychology. Because the possession question is a question about. Whether people actually have this virtue or not. It's not the question, what is honesty. That's more philosophical question is the question, do people are people honest. Does it exist in our society. What extent is it is the virtue of honesty possessed. I can't answer from the armchair I can't just sit in my office here like for us and think really hard okay I've got the answer it's 50% or 75%. That's not going to work I need some empirical data to help me sort through that. So, here's some possible answers we might arrive at, because they most people have the virtue of honesty. I wouldn't really be optimistic about that one but maybe most people have the vice of dishonesty. Most people occupy a middle space between honesty and dishonesty maybe they're a mixed bag or they're having mixed character. People are split roughly, equally, between some having virtue of honesty and others having a vice of dishonesty. People are split roughly between honesty dishonesty in the middle space, and other options to we just don't know ahead of time, these are conceptual possibilities, but we have to get some data to help us sort through them. Unfortunately, the data is not great. We have some serious limitations to the data such as exist now another reason why we're doing honestly project and trying to get more work, more attention being paid to this topic. Here's one big limitation almost all the studies of all Western populations. Another one is that there are almost no longitudinal studies. So that means following the same people over time, as opposed to study which just looks at a group of people out of one single moment. Let's take the same people involved over time in different situations. They're very hard to do very expensive, not enough good data to assess honesty in general for stealing for promise breaking for deceiving. However, when we come to lying and cheating there, I think we do have a fair amount of good data and have kind of summarized and reviewed it in a book that's coming out this year. So let me give you just a little bit of a taste of that data can't go into it too much. So please understand that this is very, very selective and just a cursory review, and then you'll see where I end up with my conclusion about what people's character looks like. So here's the old study 1976 just minutes are taking a test experiment says he has to leave 10 minutes experiment says the timer bell for five minutes with the warning to remember to not to go any further after the bell rings. So trusting those people to listen to the bell and stop when it rings. What do you think they did. And if we were in person I'd ask for a show of hands how many people think that they went over five minutes how many people think they went under five minutes, but here's the answer. 71% went over five minutes. Hey, that doesn't prove anything that's not a big dramatic study, but it's, it's one piece of the puzzle. This is Brian and colleagues 2013 told online participants about recent evidence for the paranormal. Now this is, this involves a little bit of deception, putting a lot of honesty studies involved being dishonest to participants but we'll let that go. Ask them to flip a coin. At times, I'll try and influence the outcome of each flip of their minds. They were told that we've seen $1 for each time they reported getting heads. How do you think they did. Their minds were really powerful. Well they were told me don't don't cheat. Please don't cheat report. You know, even a small amount of cheating went under my study. Please please please please don't cheat. And nevertheless, participants reported 6.22 heads, well about chance. Not as much as they could have, they could have said 10. I got paid accordingly. It seemed like they cheated to some extent, not as much as they could. Another study I'll skip this one just as a die roll instead of a coin flip. So you get paid based upon the die roll, and similarly, cheating was found in that study, but not as much as it could have been. Let me end with this one, one of my favorite ones to talk about by Lisa shoe in 2011. She's participant completed a worksheet with 20 problems. They knew they would be paid 50 cents per correct answer. This is one that, you know, next closely to me as a teacher, thinking my my students and student cheating and incentivize them to not cheat for the right reasons. So in this case they would be paid per correct answer and the control condition. If they were cheating sheets, they would just take the test, turn in somebody in charge would grade it, they would be paid based upon their performance, we're done. A different group though, in a shredder condition. Well, in this case there was some wiggle room. They would be the ones to grade their answer keys. The materials will be shredded and they would be paid according to what they reported their performance to me. No questions asked. Well, how do you think they did in quotation marks, how do you think they did. I've already primed you for this you know probably set you up for the answer so there's not probably not the shredder they use but a picture of a shredder. The opportunity to cheat the baseline 7.97 and the opportunity to cheat 13.22. That's not just I don't think based upon the second group being much smarter, and much better at the test. I think we know what was going on there was a real reason was why they reported that average. Okay. So, generalizing. There's lots of more studies, I could report to you we don't have time to get into them. I'm just going to summarize some of the findings. The majority of participants across a lot of these studies engaged in cheating behavior. When I thought they could get away with it. And there was some non trivial reward associated with cheating. And at the same time when participants cheated in the behavioral tasks, it was usually to a monitor degree and almost never the full amounts they were able to. That's a second observation because well established. Now what what's going on. How do we explain this data. What's the causal story about the psychology of most people. Here's again covering ground pretty quickly and I think this is a fair representation of the leading explanation of what's going on most people generally believe that cheating is morally wrong. At least in most cases. That's a good thing that their belief is there. At the same time, most people want to cheat. If by doing so they can benefit themselves in some way by their own lights. It makes the cheating seem worthwhile. And if they think they can get away with it and not get caught. So we've got two things going on now and some tension. I think the cheating is wrong and also desire to cheat. If you think you can get away with it and be worthwhile. There's more to this story though. Two other elements are often used to explain cheating behavior. Most people want others to think of themselves as honest people. So impression management matters. We want others to have a positive view of ourselves in general, and of our character and what others to think of us as good people, and in particular here as honest people. Most people want to think of themselves as honest people. That's different than the third. Most people want to think of themselves. I want to be able to think of myself independently what other people think, I want to be able to think of myself as a person. Now those are four elements of this explanation. They are all important. They all fit the data. They help explain why people cheat to some extent. So they don't cheat as much as they could. Because if you went all the way and cheated, say, I got 20 problems, correct. Or I got heads every single time. Then it would be very hard to think of yourself as an honest person. But if you bend the rules to some degree, to a minor degree, you say, yeah, I inflate the results a little bit. Maybe you can hold it all together, both your belief that you're an honest person and your desire to cheat and benefit from cheating. So to wrap this up, the section up, here's a question. Has this explanatory psychological story fits with a conceptual count ways to be an honest person, or to put it a lot easier language than that. Is this the mindset you'd expect of an honest person? What you would expect an honest person to be like. To think that way, to feel that way. And I say, no. I say that the data such that it is supports a picture like this. Where most of us by that us means in the West because the studies are in the West. And people today because we don't have studies going back hundreds of years ago. Most of us fall short of honesty. We don't qualify as being honest for people. We're somewhere in the middle that you can see on this diagram here in front of you, a murky middle space between honesty and dishonesty. That's where I put most people, but not all people. I think it's a bell curve here. I think they're outliers. You can have your exceptionally honest people on the left hand side. I'm looking at least and you're dishonest people on the right hand side. There are certainly people like that too. You've got your Abraham Lincoln's on the one hand, and you got your, you know, put it wherever you want from my first slide of people in the news on your on the right hand side for dishonesty. Most of us I think our mixed bag falling short of honesty. Okay. So what, who cares. Why does matter. Well, it might have some disturbing implications. Here's one, this might be unsettling. Maybe your friends you think are honest, probably or not. Now, I, that copy is too strong. I may have disabellaged that a little bit for rhetorical effects. I mean, you, you know, you're thinking close friends, you know them well. And I think you can look into their, their character and like, you know, hopefully they're honest. But many of you at least your acquaintances and casual friends and so forth, probably or not. Statistical grants. I mean, we should be very cautious before judging someone to be honest or dishonest. We need to know his or her character very well. A couple of behavioral observations are not enough. I'm an advocate of exhibiting a lot of caution here before labeling somebody someone with a character label. We can predict how people behave better with a more complex understanding of the characters rather than by just talking to us in general or dishonest in general. You can label someone as honest, they're going to behave in some cases in a surprising way that don't meet your expectations. Same if you label someone as dishonest. We should lower expectations about how honest people will tend to be unless your audience pretty cynical about that, in which case you maybe don't need to lower them. Maybe you should raise your expectations if they're not in fact dishonest. And then the last one, the understanding how we fall short of honesty, we can work harder more productively at the growing in honesty becoming more honest people. All right. And with that, that takes us to the final topic. If I'm okay on time, we started a little, a little bit late. Okay, final topic for today. So here's how it's going. First, trying to figure out what honesty is. It's more philosophical, but impact the definition and get clear on the concepts. We need to know what the standard is that we're talking about what this conversation about. Secondly, how are we actually doing today. What are the facts on the ground are most people honest. Second part. Thirdly, why do this, what I call character gap between our actual character and our honest character. Thirdly now we there's the cultivation question. There's the question of, given that this is the definition of honesty, what we should be aiming for. And given that we fall short of it. What steps can we take to try and bridge that gap to shrink that space between our actual character and the honest character we should have. This is a huge topic. There's no way I can do it any kind of justice here but at least I'll give you by way of conclusion a few preliminary ideas, and maybe some more practical suggestions as a takeaway. I think one way to go here is to go back to that psychological picture and try to target different areas of it. So, start by that first piece being most people generally believe that cheating is morally wrong. If that's true. How can we use that to our advantage to try and foster honesty to promote honesty in our own lives personally in the lives of our friends and family members. In my case in the lives of my children, my students. Well, the thought arises here that let's try and increase the salience of these more beliefs, let's make them more conscious more psychologically relevant more part of our daily lives, as opposed to being suppressed, or hidden, or not playing as big of a role. Now, propose two specific applications of that in the form of more reminders and robots. More reminders and enroll models of honesty. Let me elaborate on each of them briefly. So sustain more reminders. Here's the idea use regular more reminders that serve to make a moral commitment salience. And there by work against our solely pursuing our own self interest. That way of putting it shows it doesn't just apply to honesty this can be across the board anything having to do with morality. I'm going to talk about honesty. I give an example, namely the honor code. I know you all in the military in general, values the honor code very seriously. Some schools and places of middle schools high schools colleges do not. I'm working to try and get them to change their outlook and realize the honor code is really valuable, really important to get into this a little bit empirically. So I'm going to take a look at that study that had to do with the shredder and taking the test with the 20 problems. There's some other researchers Mazur and colleagues from 2008. They were using that shredder setup as well 50 cents for correct answer control condition only 3.4 out of 20 correct. The shredder condition 6.1 out of 20 correct in quotation marks. Now, in a third variation, they had the participants who were students sign their universities honor code before taking the test, the results. 3.1. So not statistically significant difference from 3.4 the point is it goes back down to the baseline. Even if we increase the incentive to cheat $2 per correct answer. The honor code condition 3.2 shredder condition 5.0, and I don't go condition 3.0. So increase monetary incentive to cheat had no impact in that version either. What's the idea. I'm sorry. What's the idea here. The idea is that the honor code serves as a more reminder. It's not to mind people's values, which they had all along because we're not paying attention to me we're not cognizance of them. The honor code trigger those values and had those values play a causal role in steering people in the right direction, and away from cheating. That's the idea. Another study's bear this out in a more systematic fashion if you're interested in this McCabe, Donald McCabe is, I think, probably the best person on this 28% of college students without our code. There's no promise that the honor code is going to cure everything. Look, each of these are still cheating going on. It's instead meant to be a way to try and curb. It's instead meant to be a way to try and curb incentive to cheat. Not going to fix any problems. No, not going to be any more cheating scandals. No, no, no, that's not what the claim is. It's meant to be a helpful tool. And there are others, plenty of others, more reminders. If you want to go back and look at them I won't take the time to go through them in detail but a daily reading confession, the friend or family member or higher power, if you have to believe in higher power. Tangible more reminders people used to wear that what WW JD wristbands or live strong. Those service more reminders. Technology can be harnessed to go to sometimes text emails with encouragement to be more honest, and a reflective after the day is done, as opposed to reading at the being of the day reflective after the day is done, diary or summary of how the day is gone, including moments where there's an opportunity to cheat or not. So that's the idea of more reminders. Real quickly the other strategy here designed to increase the salience of our moral values and our values against against cheating and lying and stealing is up to appeal to more role models. Here's a great example. More historical one of course Abraham Lincoln is asked to historically in America who's the exemplar of honesty. Most people would say Abraham Lincoln. This strategy isn't limited to honesty though, you can talk about the strategy with respect to courage area Tubman. You can talk about with respect to compassion Leopold social who protected 20 Jews in a sewer system in Poland for two years during World War two extraordinary story. The broad idea is that look. There are people who do much better than us. They are exemplary, they are moral heroes are more saints, they are there with a morally virtuous. And we can seek them out. Come to admire them. And when we admire them not just at a distance admiration can trigger in us a desire to emulate them to imitate them to become more like them. In every way I don't know no desire to become presidents, but in the respect that matters the basis for the admiration the honesty, the courage, the compassion. So it's a, it's a cognitive process. I admire them. It's also an emotional process. I'm inspired and moved powerfully to become more like them in my own life to my character to their level rather than dragging their character down to my level. Professor. You know, I think about what how this might go in the student context and how this might be practically implemented. So, this might have some, you know, this might be able to be adapted, but what is have students research and ideally interview a relevant and attainable exemplar of honesty. With an emphasis on the students emotional responses to learning about the exemplars honesty. It doesn't really seem to matter on empirical grounds here that's relevant. If the person is just so living in such different times and different circumstances that you don't really speak to your own, you know your own world that are not going to have much of an impact attainable. If they're so holy and so perfect that sometimes can be discouraging. If they don't seem like I could ever become like them kind of hopeless and can feel like be your beat down by them. So it helps to have an attainable exemplar. And if there's this emotional connection, someone you can relate to and bonds with an emotional. Okay. For the last thing for today I promise. I think we're good on time. So it's just one more idea. This is going to be the sketches and the best to go by. I'm not going to unpack it more. But at least I thought I should say something about number two here. Not just number one. Number two remember was the kind of less admirable side of our character, according which most people want to cheat if by doing so they can benefit themselves in some way. It makes a cheating seem worthwhile. If they think they can get away with it and not get caught. So it's like the positive side emphasize the moral values and the moral beliefs. But it seems like something should be said about this to the more negative side from an honesty perspective. Well, I guess the goal here would be to try and weaken the desire. At least a goal maybe not the only one thing you try to do is weaken people's desire including my own desire to choose. Well punishment of course is a strategy. I'm not opposed to it in any way. You can have a weaker desire to cheat if you fear that you're going to get punished. If you're discovered for cheating. I could certainly weaken your desire to cheat. Or if you think that you know there are very, very few opportunities to actually get caught. And so you might not pay much attention to cheating if you think you're not going to ever have an opportunity to get away with it. The caveat though when it comes to punishment is that even if you find people cheating less. That only covers the behavioral side. And I've said that motivation and the heart matter too. So if it's less cheating behavior but because of punishment avoidance reasons, I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to get kicked out of such and such school. I don't want to get demoted. That's not a virtuous reason. So that will not take you all the way to honesty, I say. It's good. I mean, I don't want to, hey, less cheating. That's great. The behavior is improved. Thumbs up, right. We need some of that right now. If you're cheating, but it's not going to be taking you all the way where I think we need to go. Another way to go here, and this is going to be just very hand wavy and sketchy, but another way to go is to instead of foster up, make it just punishments is to use other virtues to come alongside of honesty and try and grow honesty. Virtues like love and compassion. So if you have genuine love, I don't mean erotic love here. I mean, that is genuine love to but I'm talking about different kind of love, where I got theistic love. Love for the other person for his or her own sake, caring about what's good for the other person for his or her own sake. That's what we're talking about. That seems to me to be fundamentally incompatible with the desire to cheat someone. It's hard to see how you can do that and at the same time, cheat them for self interesting game. So to the extent to which I want to cheat or lie to my children, my parents, wife without good reason seems like that's going to undermine to some extent, I love for them. And so the suggestion is to foster other virtues as well. It's not just I'm seeing a vacuum and foster a variety of virtues together. And they can mutually reinforce and grow each other. And so the extent to which we grow love and compassion, we can also grow in honesty as well. Okay, I know that I'll leave you some, some caveats here and some some questions. This is just scratching the surface there's so much more to be done. Questions I didn't even get a chance to get into today, like is lying ever permitted. What about lies? What about serious situations where you can protect yourself people by lying. Why do I say that there's lack of evidence for dishonesty. I said it was mainly lack of, I said there's mainly evidence for lack of honesty. But what about dishonesty. And are there other strategies worth exploring for fostering honesty. I'd love to hear them. I don't say by any means that I've covered all but plenty of others are worth covering too. I'll stop here. Thank you for putting up with me over your lunch and note that I'm trying to get into all this a lot more detail in the book that's come out this year and say thank you and thank funding sources.