The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Golf

The income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf has.

—WILL ROGERS

There’s a scene in the movie The Legend of Bagger Vance where Matt Damon’s character, Rannulph Junuh, is attempting to get his golf game back, but he makes a critical error and his ball ends up in the woods. After making it back onto the green, he moves a twig that is just adjacent to the ball in order to create a clear path for his shot. As he moves the twig the ball rolls a tiny bit to the side. According to the rules, he has to count it as a stroke. At that point in the match, Junuh had gained enough of a lead that if he ignored the rule, he could win, making a comeback and restoring his former glory. His youthful assistant tearfully begs Junuh to ignore the movement of the ball. “It was an accident,” the assistant says, “and it’s a stupid rule anyway. Plus, no one would ever know.” Junuh turns to him and says stoically, “I will. And so will you.”

Even Junuh’s opponents suggest that most likely the ball just wobbled and returned to its former position or that the light tricked Junuh into thinking that the ball moved. But Junuh insists that the ball rolled away. The result is an honorably tied game.

That scene was inspired by a real event that occurred during the 1925 U.S. Open. The golfer, Bobby Jones, noticed that his ball moved ever so slightly as he prepared for his shot in the rough. No one saw, no one would ever have known, but he called the stroke on himself and went on to lose the match. When people discovered what he’d done and reporters began to flock to him, Jones famously asked them not to write about the event, saying “You might as well praise me for not robbing banks.” This legendary moment of noble honesty is still referred to by those who love the game, and for good reason.

I think this scene—both cinematic and historic—captures the romantic ideal of golf. It’s a demonstration of man versus himself, showing both his skill and nobility. Perhaps these characteristics of self-reliance, self-monitoring, and high moral standards are why golf is often used as a metaphor for business ethics (not to mention the fact that so many businesspeople spend so much time on golf courses). Unlike other sports, golf has no referee, umpire, or panel of judges to make sure rules are followed or to make calls in questionable situations. The golfer, much like the businessperson, has to decide for him- or herself what is and is not acceptable. Golfers and businesspeople must choose for themselves what they are willing and not willing to do, since most of the time there is no one else to supervise or check their work. In fact, golf’s three underlying rules are, Play the ball as it lies, play the course as you find it, and if you cannot do either, do what is fair. But “fair” is a notoriously difficult thing to determine. After all, a lot of people might judge not counting an accidental and inconsequential change in the ball’s location after a movement of a twig as “fair.” In fact, it might seem pretty unfair to be penalized for an incidental movement of the ball.

DESPITE THE NOBLE heritage that golfers claim for their sport, it seems that many people view the game in the same way Will Rogers did: as one that will make a cheater out of anyone. That is not terribly surprising when you stop to think about it. In golf, players hit a tiny ball across a great distance, replete with obstacles, into a very small hole. In other words, it’s extremely frustrating and difficult, and when we’re the ones judging our own performance, it seems that there would be many times where we might be a little extra lenient when it comes to applying the rules to our own score.

So in our quest to learn more about dishonesty, we turned to our nation’s many golfers. In 2009, Scott McKenzie (a Duke undergraduate student at the time) and I carried out a study in which we asked thousands of golfers a series of questions about how they play the game and, most importantly, how they cheat. We asked them to imagine situations in which nobody could observe them (as is often the case in golf) and they could decide to follow the rules (or not) without any negative consequences. With the help of a company that manages golf courses, we e-mailed golfers around the United States, asking them to participate in a survey on golf in return for a chance to win all kinds of high-end golf equipment. About twelve thousand golfers answered our call, and here is what we learned.

Moving the Ball

“Imagine,” we asked the participants, “that as the average golfer approaches their ball they realize that it would be highly advantageous if the ball would lie 4 inches away from where it is currently. How likely do you think the average golfer would be to move the ball by these 4 inches?”

This question appeared in three different versions, each describing a different approach for improving the unfortunate location of the ball (it is a curious coincidence, by the way, that in golf lingo the location of the ball is called a “lie”). How comfortable do you think the average golfer would be about moving the ball 4 inches (1) with his club; (2) with his shoe; and (3) by picking the ball up and placing it 4 inches away?

The “moving the ball” questions were designed to see whether in golf, as in our previous experiments, the distance from the dishonest action would change the tendency to behave immorally. If distance worked in the same way as the token experiment we discussed earlier (see chapter 2, “Fun with the Fudge Factor”), we would expect to have the lowest level of cheating when the movement was carried out explicitly with one’s hand; we would see higher levels of cheating when the movement was accomplished with a shoe; and we would see the highest level of dishonesty when the distance was greatest and the movement was achieved via an instrument (a golf club) that removed the player from direct contact with the ball.

What our results showed is that dishonesty in golf, much as in our other experiments, is indeed directly influenced by the psychological distance from the action. Cheating becomes much simpler when there are more steps between us and the dishonest act. Our respondents felt that moving the ball with a club was the easiest, and they stated that the average golfer would do it 23 percent of the time. Next was kicking the ball (14 percent of the time), and finally, picking up and moving the ball was the most morally difficult way to improve the ball’s position (10 percent of the time).

These results suggest that if we pick up the ball and reposition it, there is no way we can ignore the purposefulness and intentionality of the act, and accordingly we cannot help but feel that we have done something unethical. When we kick the ball with our shoe, there is a little bit of distance from the act, but we are still the ones doing the kicking. But when the club is doing the tapping (and especially if we move the ball in a slightly haphazard and imprecise way) we can justify what we have done relatively easily. “After all,” we might say to ourselves, “perhaps there was some element of luck in exactly how the ball ended up being positioned.” In that case, we can almost fully forgive ourselves.

Taking Mulligans

Legend has it that in the 1920s, a Canadian golfer named David Mulligan was golfing at a country club in Montreal. One day, he teed off and wasn’t happy with his shot, so he reteed and tried again. According to the story, he called it a “correction shot,” but his partners thought “mulligan” was a better name, and it stuck as the official term for a “do-over” in golf.

These days, if a shot is egregiously bad, a golfer might write it off as a “mulligan,” place the ball back at its original starting point, and score himself as if the shot never happened (one of my friends refers to her husband’s ex-wife as a “mulligan”). Strictly speaking, mulligans are never allowed, but in friendly games, players sometimes agree in advance that mulligans are permitted. Of course, even when mulligans are not legal nor agreed upon, golfers still take them from time to time, and those illegal mulligans were the focus of our next set of questions.

We asked our participants how likely other golfers are to take illegal mulligans when they could do it without being noticed by the other players. In one version of this question, we asked them about the likelihood of someone taking an illegal mulligan on the first hole. In the second version of the question we asked them about the likelihood of taking an illegal mulligan on the ninth hole.

To be clear, the rules don’t differentiate between these two acts: they are equally prohibited. At the same time, it seems that it is easier to rationalize a do-over on the first hole than on the ninth hole. If you’re on the first hole and you start over, you can pretend that “now I am really starting the game, and from now on every shot will count.” But if you are on the ninth hole, there is no way for you to pretend that the game has not yet started. This means that if you take a mulligan you have to admit to yourself that you are simply not counting a shot.

As we would expect based on what we already knew about self-justification from our other experiments, we found a vast difference in the willingness to take mulligans. Our golfers predicted that 40 percent of golfers would take a mulligan on the first hole while (only?) 15 percent of golfers would take a mulligan on the ninth hole.

Fuzzy Reality

In a third set of questions, we asked the golfers to imagine that they shot 6 strokes on a par–5 hole (a hole that good players can complete in 5 strokes). In one version of this question we asked whether the average golfer would write down “5” instead of “6” on his scorecard. In the second version of this question, we asked how likely the average golfer would be to record his score accurately but then, when it comes to adding the scores up, count the 6 as a 5 and thus get the same discount on the score but doing so by adding incorrectly.

We wanted to see whether it would be more easily justifiable to write down the score wrongly to start with, because once the score is written, it is hard to justify adding incorrectly (akin to repositioning a ball by hand). After all, adding incorrectly is an explicit and deliberate act of cheating that cannot be as easily rationalized. That was indeed what we found. Our golfers predicted that in such cases, 15 percent of golfers would write down an improved score, while many fewer (5 percent) would add their score inaccurately.

The great golfer Arnold Palmer once said, “I have a tip that can take five strokes off anyone’s golf game. It’s called an eraser.” It appears, however, that the vast majority of golfers are unwilling to go this route, or at least that they would have an easier time cheating if they did not write the score correctly from the get-go. So here’s the timeless “if-a-tree-falls-in-the-forest”-type question: if a golfer shoots a 6 on a par–5 hole, the score is not recorded, and there is no one there to see it—is his score a 6 or a 5?

LYING ABOUT A score in this way has a lot in common with a classic thought experiment called “Schrödinger’s cat.” Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist who, in 1935, described the following scenario: A cat is sealed in a steel box with a radioactive isotope that may or may not decay. If it does decay, it will set off a chain of events that will result in the cat’s death. If not, the cat will continue living. In Schrödinger’s story, as long as the box remains sealed, the cat is suspended between life and death; it cannot be described as either alive or dead. Schrödinger’s scenario was intended to critique an interpretation of physics that held that quantum mechanics did not describe objective reality—rather, it dealt only in probability. Leaving the philosophical aspects of physics aside for now, Schrödinger’s cat story might serve us well here when thinking about golf scores. A golf score might be a lot like Schrödinger’s alive-and-dead cat: until it is written down, it does not really exist in either form. Only when it’s written down does it obtain the status of “objective reality.”

YOU MAY BE wondering why we asked participants about “the average golfer” rather than about their own behavior on the course. The reason for this was that we expected that, like most people, our golfers would lie if they were asked directly about their own tendency to behave in unethical ways. By asking them about the behavior of others, we expected that they would feel free to tell the truth without feeling that they are admitting to any bad behavior themselves.^*

Still, we also wanted to examine what unethical behaviors golfers would be willing to admit to about their own behavior. What we found was that although many “other golfers” cheat, the particular participants in our study were relative angels: when asked about their own behavior, they admitted to moving the ball with their club in order to improve their lie just 8 percent of the time. Kicking the ball with their shoe was even more rare (just 4 percent of the time), and picking up the ball and moving it occurred only 2.5 percent of the time. Now, 8 percent, 4 percent, and 2.5 percent might still look like big numbers (particularly given the fact that a golf course has 18 holes and many different ways to be dishonest), but they pale in comparison to what “other golfers” do.

We found similar differences in golfers’ responses regarding mulligans and scorekeeping. Our participants reported that they would take a mulligan on the first hole only 18 percent of the time and on the ninth hole just 4 percent of the time. They also said that they would write in the wrong score only 4 percent of the time, and barely 1 percent copped to something as egregious as mistallying their scores.

So here’s a summary of our results:

I am not sure how you want to interpret these differences, but it looks to me as though golfers not only cheat a lot in golf, they also lie about lying.

WHAT HAVE WE learned from this fairway adventure? It seems that cheating in golf captures many of the nuances we discovered about cheating in our laboratory experiments. When our actions are more distant from the execution of the dishonest act, when they are suspended, and when we can more easily rationalize them, golfers—like every other human on the planet—find it easier to be dishonest. It also seems that golfers, like everyone else, have the ability to be dishonest but at the same time think of themselves as honest. And what have we learned about the cheating of businesspeople? Well. When the rules are somewhat open to interpretation, when there are gray areas, and when people are left to score their own performance—even honorable games such as golf can be traps for dishonesty.