The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty

Why Wearing Fakes Makes Us Cheat More

Let me tell you the story of my debut into the world of fashion. When Jennifer Wideman Green (a friend of mine from graduate school) ended up living in New York City, she met a number of people in the fashion industry. Through her I met Freeda Fawal-Farah, who worked for Harper’s Bazaar, a gold standard in the fashion industry. A few months later Freeda invited me to give a talk at the magazine, and because it was such an atypical crowd for me, I agreed.

Before I started my talk, Freeda treated me to a quick fashion tutorial as we sipped our lattes in a balcony café overlooking the escalator in the big downtown Manhattan building. Freeda gave me a rundown of the outfits worn by every woman who passed us, including the brands they were wearing and what her clothes and shoes said about her lifestyle. I found her attention to every detail—indeed, the whole fashion analysis—fascinating, the way I imagine expert bird watchers are able to discern minute differences between species.

About thirty minutes later, I found myself on a stage before an auditorium full of fashion mavens. It was a tremendous pleasure to be surrounded by so many attractive and well-dressed women. Each woman was like an exhibit in a museum: her jewelry, her makeup, and, of course, her stunning shoes. Thanks to Freeda’s tutorial, I was able to recognize a few of the brands when I looked out into the rows. I could even discern the sense of fashion that inspired each ensemble.

I wasn’t sure why those fashionistas wanted me there or what they expected to hear from me. Still, we seemed to have good chemistry. I talked about how people make decisions, how we compare prices when we are trying to figure out how much something is worth, how we compare ourselves to others, and so on. They laughed when I hoped they would, asked thoughtful questions, and offered plenty of their own interesting ideas. When I finished the talk, Valerie Salembier, the publisher of Harper’s Bazaar, came onstage, hugged and thanked me—and gave me a stylish black Prada overnight bag.

AFTER SAYING OUR good-byes, I left the building with my new Prada bag and headed downtown to my next meeting. I had some time to kill, so I decided to take a walk. As I wandered, I couldn’t help thinking about my big black leather bag with its large Prada logo displayed. I debated with myself: should I carry my new bag with the logo facing outward? That way, other people could see and admire it (or maybe just wonder how someone wearing jeans and red sneakers could possibly have procured it). Or should I carry it with the logo facing toward me, so that no one could recognize that it was a Prada? I decided on the latter and turned the bag around.

Even though I was pretty sure that with the logo hidden no one realized it was a Prada bag, and despite the fact that I don’t think of myself as someone who cares about fashion, something felt different to me. I was continuously aware of the brand on the bag. I was wearing Prada! And it made me feel different; I stood a little straighter and walked with a bit more swagger. I wondered what would happen if I wore Ferrari underwear. Would I feel more invigorated? More confident? More agile? Faster?

I continued walking and passed through Chinatown, which was bustling with activity, food, smells, and street vendors selling their wares along Canal Street. Not far away, I spotted an attractive young couple in their twenties taking in the scene. A Chinese man approached them. “Handbags, handbags!” he called, tilting his head to indicate the direction of his small shop. At first they didn’t react. Then, after a moment or two, the woman asked the Chinese man, “You have Prada?”

The vendor nodded. I watched as she conferred with her partner. He smiled at her, and they followed the man to his stand.

The Prada they were referring to, of course, was not actually Prada. Nor were the $5 “designer” sunglasses on display in his stand really Dolce&Gabbana. And the Armani perfumes displayed over by the street food stands? Fakes too.^*

From Ermine to Armani

Let’s pause for a moment and consider the history of wardrobes, thinking specifically about something social scientists call external signaling, which is simply the way we broadcast to others who we are by what we wear. Going back a way, ancient Roman law included a set of regulations called sumptuary laws, which filtered down through the centuries into the laws of nearly all European nations. Among other things, the laws dictated who could wear what, according to their station and class. The laws went into an extraordinary level of detail. For example, in Renaissance England, only the nobility could wear certain kinds of fur, fabrics, laces, decorative beading per square foot, and so on, while those in the gentry could wear decisively less appealing clothing. (The poorest were generally excluded from the law, as there was little point in regulating musty burlap, wool, and hair shirts.)

Some groups were further differentiated so as not to be confused with “respectable” people. For instance, prostitutes had to wear striped hoods to signal their “impurity,” and heretics were sometimes forced to don patches decorated with wood bundles to indicate that they could or should be burned at the stake. In a sense, a prostitute going out without her mandatory striped hood was in disguise, like someone wearing a pair of fake Gucci sunglasses. A solid, nonstriped hood sent a false signal of the woman’s livelihood and economic status. People who “dressed above their station” were silently, but directly, lying to those around them. Although dressing above one’s station was not a capital offense, those who broke the law were often hit with fines and other punishments.

What may seem to be an absurd degree of obsessive compulsion on the part of the upper crust was in reality an effort to ensure that people were what they signaled themselves to be; the system was designed to eliminate disorder and confusion. (It clearly had some signaling advantages, though I am not suggesting that we revert back to it.) Although our current sartorial class system is not as rigid as it was in the past, the desire to signal success and individuality is as strong today as ever. The fashionably privileged now wear Armani instead of ermine. And just as Freeda knew that Via Spiga platform heels weren’t for everyone, the signals we send are undeniably informative to those around us.

NOW, YOU MIGHT think that the people who buy knockoffs don’t actually hurt the fashion manufacturer because many of them would never buy the real thing to start with. But that is where the effect of external signaling comes in. After all, if a bunch of people buy knockoff Burberry scarves for $10, others—the few who can afford the real thing and want to buy it—might not be willing to pay twenty times more for the authentic scarves. If it is the case that when we see a person wearing a signature Burberry plaid or carrying a Louis Vuitton LV-patterned bag, we immediately suspect that it is a fake, then what is the signaling value in buying the authentic version? This perspective means that the people who purchase knockoffs dilute the potency of external signaling and undermine the authenticity of the real product (and its wearer). And that is one reason why fashion retailers and fashionistas care so much about counterfeits.

WHEN THINKING ABOUT my experience with the Prada bag, I wondered whether there were other psychological forces related to fakes that go beyond external signaling. There I was in Chinatown holding my real Prada bag, watching the woman emerge from the shop holding her fake one. Despite the fact that I had neither picked out nor paid for mine, it felt to me that there was a substantial difference between the way I related to my bag and the way she related to hers.

More generally, I started wondering about the relationship between what we wear and how we behave, and it made me think about a concept that social scientists call self-signaling. The basic idea behind self-signaling is that despite what we tend to think, we don’t have a very clear notion of who we are. We generally believe that we have a privileged view of our own preferences and character, but in reality we don’t know ourselves that well (and definitely not as well as we think we do). Instead, we observe ourselves in the same way we observe and judge the actions of other people—inferring who we are and what we like from our actions.

For example, imagine that you see a beggar on the street. Rather than ignoring him or giving him money, you decide to buy him a sandwich. The action in itself does not define who you are, your morality, or your character, but you interpret the deed as evidence of your compassionate and charitable character. Now, armed with this “new” information, you start believing more intensely in your own benevolence. That’s self-signaling at work.

The same principle could also apply to fashion accessories. Carrying a real Prada bag—even if no one else knows it is real—could make us think and act a little differently than if we were carrying a counterfeit one. Which brings us to the questions: Does wearing counterfeit products somehow make us feel less legitimate? Is it possible that accessorizing with fakes might affect us in unexpected and negative ways?

Calling All Chloés

I decided to call Freeda and tell her about my recent interest in high fashion. (I think she was even more surprised than I was.) During our conversation, Freeda promised to convince a fashion designer to lend me some items to use in some experiments. A few weeks later, I received a package from the Chloé label containing twenty handbags and twenty pairs of sunglasses. The statement accompanying the package told me that the handbags were estimated to be worth around $40,000 and the sunglasses around $7,000.^*

With those hot commodities in hand, Francesca Gino, Mike Norton (a professor at Harvard University), and I set about testing whether participants who wore fake products would feel and behave differently from those wearing authentic ones. If our participants felt that wearing fakes would broadcast (even to themselves) a less honorable self-image, we wondered whether they might start thinking of themselves as somewhat less honest. And with this tainted self-concept in mind, would they be more likely to continue down the road of dishonesty?

Using the lure of Chloé accessories, we enlisted many female MBA students for our experiment. (We focused on women not because we thought that they were different from men in any moral way—in fact, in all of our previous experiments we did not find any sex-related differences—but because the accessories we had were clearly designed for women.) We wondered whether to use the sunglasses or the handbags in our first experiments, but when we realized that it would have been a bit more difficult to explain why we wanted our participants to walk around the building with handbags, we settled on the sunglasses.

AT THE START of the experiment, we assigned each woman to one of three conditions: authentic, fake, or no information. In the authentic condition, we told participants that they would be donning real Chloé designer sunglasses. In the fake condition, we told them that they would be wearing counterfeit sunglasses that looked identical to those made by Chloé (in actuality all the products we used were the real McCoy). Finally, in the no-information condition, we didn’t say anything about the authenticity of the sunglasses.

Once the women donned their sunglasses, we directed them to the hallway, where we asked them to look at different posters and out the windows so that they could later evaluate the quality and experience of looking through their sunglasses. Soon after, we called them into another room for another task. What was the task? You guessed it: while the women were still wearing their sunglasses we gave them our old friend, the matrix task.

Now imagine yourself as a participant in this study. You show up to the lab, and you’re randomly assigned to the fake condition. The experimenter informs you that your glasses are counterfeit and instructs you to test them out to see what you think. You’re handed a rather real-looking case (the logo is spot-on!), and you pull out the sunglasses, examine them, and slip them on. Once you’ve put on the specs, you start walking around the hallway, examining different posters and looking out the windows. But while you are doing so, what is going through your head? Do you compare the sunglasses to the pair in your car or the ones you broke the other day? Do you think, “Yeah, these are very convincing. No one would be able to tell they’re fake.” Maybe you think that the weight doesn’t feel right or that the plastic seems cheap. And if you do think about the fakeness of what you are wearing, would it cause you to cheat more on the matrix test? Less? The same amount?

Here’s what we found. As usual, lots of people cheated by a few questions. But while “only” 30 percent of the participants in the authentic condition reported solving more matrices than they actually had, 74 percent of those in the fake condition reported solving more matrices than they actually had.

These results gave rise to another interesting question. Did the presumed fakeness of the product make the women cheat more than they naturally would? Or did the genuine Chloé label make them behave more honestly than they would otherwise? In other words, which was more powerful: the negative self-signaling in the fake condition or the positive self-signaling in the authentic condition?

This is why we also had the no-information (control) condition, in which we didn’t mention anything about whether the sunglasses were real or fake. How would the no-information condition help us? Let’s say that women wearing the fake glasses cheated at the same level as those in the no-information condition. If that were the case, we could conclude that the counterfeit label did not make the women any more dishonest than they were naturally and that the genuine label was causing higher honesty. On the other hand, if we saw that the women wearing the real Chloé sunglasses cheated at the same level as those in the no-information condition (and much less than those in the fake-label condition), we would conclude that the authentic label did not make the women any more honest than they were naturally and that the fake label was causing women to behave less honestly.

As you’ll recall, 30 percent of women in the authentic condition and 73 percent of women in the fake-label condition overreported the number of matrices they solved. And in the no-information condition? In that condition 42 percent of the women cheated. The no-information condition was between the two, but it was much closer to the authentic condition (in fact, the two conditions were not statistically different from each other). These results suggest that wearing a genuine product does not increase our honesty (or at least not by much). But once we knowingly put on a counterfeit product, moral constraints loosen to some degree, making it easier for us to take further steps down the path of dishonesty.

The moral of the story? If you, your friend, or someone you are dating wears counterfeit products, be careful! Another act of dishonesty may be closer than you expect.

The “What-the-Hell” Effect

Now let’s pause for a minute to think again about what happens when you go on a diet. When you start out, you work hard to stick to the diet’s difficult rules: half a grapefruit, a slice of dry multigrain toast, and a poached egg for breakfast; turkey slices on salad with zero-calorie dressing for lunch; baked fish and steamed broccoli for dinner. As we learned in the preceding chapter, “Why We Blow It When We’re Tired,” you are now honorably and predictably deprived. Then someone puts a slice of cake in front of you. The moment you give in to temptation and take that first bite, your perspective shifts. You tell yourself, “Oh, what the hell, I’ve broken my diet, so why not have the whole slice—along with that perfectly grilled, mouthwatering cheeseburger with all the trimmings I’ve been craving all week? I’ll start anew tomorrow, or maybe on Monday. And this time I’ll really stick to it.” In other words, having already tarnished your dieting self-concept, you decide to break your diet completely and make the most of your diet-free self-image (of course you don’t take into account that the same thing can happen again tomorrow and the day after, and so on).

To examine this foible in more detail, Francesca, Mike, and I wanted to examine whether failing at one small thing (such as eating one french fry when you’re supposedly on a diet) can cause one to abandon the effort altogether.

This time, imagine you’re wearing a pair of sunglasses—whether they are authentic Chloé, a fake pair, or a pair of unspecified authenticity. Next, you sit down in front of a computer screen where you’re presented with a square divided into two triangles by a diagonal line. The trial starts, and for one second, twenty randomly scattered dots flash within the square (see the diagram below). Then the dots disappear, leaving you with an empty square, the diagonal line, and two response buttons, one marked “more-on-right” and the other marked “more-on-left.” Using these two buttons, your task is to indicate whether there were more dots on the right-hand or left-hand side of the diagonal. You do this one hundred times. Sometimes the right-hand side clearly has more dots. Sometimes they are unmistakably concentrated on the left-hand side. Other times it’s hard to tell. As you can imagine, you get pretty used to the task, as tedious as it may be, and after a hundred responses the experimenter can tell how accurately you can make these sorts of judgments.

Next, the computer asks you to repeat the same task two hundred more times. Only this time, you will be paid according to your decisions. Here’s the key detail: regardless of whether your responses are accurate or not, every time you select the left-hand button, you will receive half a cent and every time you select the right-hand button, you will receive 5 cents (ten times more money).

With this incentive structure, you are occasionally faced with a basic conflict of interest. Every time you see more dots on the right, there is no ethical problem because giving the honest answer (more on the right) is the same response that makes you the most money. But when you see more dots on the left, you have to decide whether to give the accurate honest answer (more on the left), as you were instructed, or to maximize your profit by clicking the more-on-right button. By creating this skewed payment system, we gave the participants an incentive to see reality in a slightly different way and cheat by excessively clicking the more-on-right button. In other words, they were faced with a conflict between producing an accurate answer and maximizing their profit. To cheat or not to cheat, that was the question. And don’t forget, you’re doing this while still wearing the sunglasses.

As it turned out, our dots task showed the same general results as the matrix task, with lots of people cheating but just by a bit. Interestingly, we also saw that the amount of cheating was especially large for those wearing the fake sunglasses. What’s more, the counterfeit wearers cheated more across the board. They cheated more when it was hard to tell which side had more dots, and they cheated more even when it was clear that the correct answer was more on the left (the side with the lower financial reward).

Those were the overall results, but the reason we created the dots task in the first place was to observe how cheating evolves over time in situations where people have many opportunities to act dishonestly. We were interested in whether our participants started the experiment by cheating only occasionally, trying to maintain the belief that they were honest but at the same time benefitting from some occasional cheating. We suspected that this kind of balanced cheating could last for a while but that at some point participants might reach their “honesty threshold.” And once they passed that point, they would start thinking, “What the hell, as long as I’m a cheater, I might as well get the most out of it.” And from then on, they would cheat much more frequently—or even every chance they got.

The first thing that the results revealed was that the amount of cheating increased as the experiment went on. And as our intuitions had suggested, we also saw that for many people there was a very sharp transition where at some point in the experiment, they suddenly graduated from engaging in a little bit of cheating to cheating at every single opportunity they had. This general pattern of behavior is what we would expect from the what-the-hell effect, and it surfaced in both the authentic and the fake conditions. But the wearers of the fake sunglasses showed a much greater tendency to abandon their moral constraints and cheat at full throttle.^*

In terms of the what-the-hell effect, we saw that when it comes to cheating, we behave pretty much the same as we do on diets. Once we start violating our own standards (say, with cheating on diets or for monetary incentives), we are much more likely to abandon further attempts to control our behavior—and from that point on there is a good chance that we will succumb to the temptation to further misbehave.

IT SEEMS, THEN, that the clothes do make the man (or woman) and that wearing knockoffs does have an effect on ethical decisions. As is the case with many findings in social science research, there are ways to use this information for both good and ill. On the negative side, one can imagine how organizations could use this principle to loosen the morality of their employees such that they will find it easier to “fake out” their customers, suppliers, regulators, and competitors and, by doing so, increase the company’s revenue at the expense of the other parties. On the positive side, understanding how slippery slopes operate can direct us to pay more attention to early cases of transgression and help us apply the brakes before it’s too late.

Up to No Good

Having completed these experiments, Francesca, Mike, and I had evidence that wearing counterfeits colors the way we view ourselves and that once we are painted as cheaters in our own eyes, we start behaving in more dishonest ways. This led us to another question: if wearing counterfeits changes the way we view our own behavior, does it also cause us to be more suspicious of others?

To find out, we asked another group of participants to put on what we told them were either real or counterfeit Chloé sunglasses. Again, they dutifully walked the hall examining different posters and views from the windows. However, when we called them back to the lab, we did not ask them to perform our matrix or dots task. Instead, we asked them to fill out a rather long survey with their sunglasses on. In this survey, we asked a bunch of irrelevant questions (filler questions) that are meant to obscure the real goal of the study. Among the filler questions, we included three sets of questions designed to measure how our respondents interpreted and evaluated the morality of others.

The questions in set A asked participants to estimate the likelihood that people they know might engage in various ethically questionable behaviors. The questions in set B asked them to estimate the likelihood that when people say particular phrases, they are lying. Finally, set C presented participants with two scenarios depicting someone who has the opportunity to behave dishonestly, and they were asked to estimate the likelihood that the person in the scenario would take the opportunity to cheat. Here are the questions from all three sets:

Set A: How likely are people you know to engage in the following behaviors?

Stand in the express line with too many groceries.

Try to board a plane before their group number is called.

Inflate their business expense report.

Tell their supervisor that progress has been made on a project when none has been made.

Take home office supplies from work.

Lie to an insurance company about the value of goods that were damaged.

Buy a garment, wear it, and return it.

Lie to their partner about the number of sex partners they have had.

Set B: When the following lines are uttered, how likely is it that they are a lie?

Sorry I’m late, traffic was terrible.

My GPA is 4.0.

It was good meeting you. Let’s have lunch sometime.

Sure, I’ll start working on that tonight.

Yes, John was with me last night.

I thought I already sent that e-mail out. I am sure I did.

Set C: How likely are these individuals to take the action described?

Steve is the operations manager of a firm that produces pesticides and fertilizers for lawns and gardens. A certain toxic chemical is going to be banned in a year, and for this reason is extremely cheap now. If Steve buys this chemical and produces and distributes his product fast enough, he will be able to make a very nice profit. Please estimate the likelihood that Steve will sell this chemical while it is still legal.

Dale is the operations manager of a firm that produces health foods. One of their organic fruit beverages has 109 calories per serving. Dale knows that people are sensitive to crossing the critical threshold of 100 calories. He could decrease the serving size by 10 percent. The label will then say that each serving has 98 calories, and the fine print will say that each bottle contains 2.2 servings. Please estimate the likelihood that Dale will cut the serving size to avoid crossing the 100-calorie-per-serving threshold.

What were the results? You guessed it. When reflecting on the behavior of people they know (set A), participants in the counterfeit condition judged their acquaintances to be more likely to behave dishonestly than did participants in the authentic condition. They also interpreted the list of common excuses (set B) as more likely to be lies, and judged the actor in the two scenarios (set C) as being more likely to choose the shadier option. In the end, we concluded that counterfeit products not only tend to make us more dishonest; they cause us to view others as less than honest as well.

Fake It Till You Make It

So what can we do with all of these results?

First, let’s think about high-fashion companies, which have been up in arms about counterfeits for years. It may be difficult to sympathize with them; you might think that outside their immediate circle, no one should really care about the “woes” of high-end designers who cater to the wealthy. When tempted to buy a fake Prada bag, you might say to yourself, “Well, designer products are too expensive, and it’s silly to pay for the real thing.” You might say, “I wouldn’t consider buying the real product anyway, so the designer isn’t really losing any money.” Or maybe you would say, “Those fashion companies make so much money that a few people buying fake products won’t really make a difference.” Whatever rationalizations we come up with—and we are all very good at rationalizing our actions so that they are in line with our selfish motives—it’s difficult to find many people who feel that the alarm on the part of high-fashion companies is of grave personal concern.

But our results show that there’s another, more insidious story here. High-fashion companies aren’t the only ones paying a price for counterfeits. Thanks to self-signaling and the what-the-hell effect, a single act of dishonesty can change a person’s behavior from that point onward. What’s more, if it’s an act of dishonesty that comes with a built-in reminder (think about fake sunglasses with a big “Gucci” stamped on the side), the downstream influence could be long-lived and substantial. Ultimately, this means that we all pay a price for counterfeits in terms of moral currency; “faking it” changes our behavior, our self-image, and the way we view others around us.^*

Consider, for example, the fact that academic diplomas hang in many executive suites around the world and decorate even more résumés. A few years ago, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece on executives who misrepresent their academic credentials, pointing to top moguls such as Kenneth Keiser, who at the time was the president and COO of PepsiAmericas, Inc. Though Keiser had attended Michigan State University, he never graduated; still, for a long time, he signed off on papers that claimed he had a BA from Michigan State¹ (of course, it is possible that this was just a misunderstanding).

Or consider the case of Marilee Jones, who coauthored a popular guidebook called Less Stress, More Success: A New Approach to Guiding Your Teen Through College Admissions and Beyond, in which, among other things, she advocated “being yourself” in order to be successful in college admissions and job searches. She was MIT’s popular dean of admissions, and for twenty-five years, by all accounts, she did her job very well. There was just one problem: she had added several fictitious degrees to her résumé to land that job in the first place. It was an act of cheating, pure and simple. The irony of her fall from grace was not lost on Jones, who apologized for not “having the courage” to correct the “mistakes” on her fake résumé at any point during her employment. When an extremely popular advocate of “being yourself” is toppled by false credentials, what are the rest of us to think?

If you think about this type of cheating in the context of the “what-the-hell” effect, it might be that fake academic credentials often start innocently enough, perhaps along the lines of “fake it till you make it,” but once one such act has been established, it can bring about a looser moral standard and a higher tendency to cheat elsewhere. For example, if an executive holding a fake graduate degree puts constant reminders of his fake degree on his letterhead, business cards, résumé, and website, it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that he could also start cheating on expense reports, misrepresenting billable hours, or misusing corporate funds. After all, given the what-the-hell effect, it is possible that one initial act of cheating could increase the executive’s general level of self-signaled dishonesty, increasing his fudge factor, which would give rise to further fraud.

THE BOTTOM LINE is that we should not view a single act of dishonesty as just one petty act. We tend to forgive people for their first offense with the idea that it is just the first time and everyone makes mistakes. And although this may be true, we should also realize that the first act of dishonesty might be particularly important in shaping the way a person looks at himself and his actions from that point on—and because of that, the first dishonest act is the most important one to prevent. That is why it is important to cut down on the number of seemingly innocuous singular acts of dishonesty. If we do, society might become more honest and less corrupt over time (for more on this, see chapter 8, “Cheating as an Infection”).

(DON’T) STEAL THIS BOOK

Finally, no discussion of designer counterfeits could be complete without mentioning their cousin, illegal downloading. (Imagine experiments similar to the ones on fake sunglasses but using illegally downloaded music or movies.) Allow me to share a story about a time when I learned something interesting about illegal downloads. In this particular case, I was the victim. A few months after Predictably Irrational was published, I received the following e-mail:

Dear Mr. Ariely,

I just finished listening to the illegally downloaded version of your audio book this morning, and I wanted to tell you how much I appreciated it.

I am a 30-year-old African American male from the inner city of Chicago, and for the last five years, I have been making my living by illegally selling CDs and DVDs. I am the only person in my family who is not in prison or homeless. As the last survivor of a family that represents all that is wrong with America, and as someone breaking the law today, I know it is only a matter of time before I join my family in prison.

Some time ago I got a 9-to-5 job, and was excited at the idea of starting a respectable life, but soon after I started, I quit and went back to my illegal business. This is because of the pain I felt at giving up my illegal business that I had built and nurtured for five years. I owned it, and I couldn’t find a job that gave me the same feeling of ownership. Needless to say, I could really relate to your research on ownership.

But something else was equally important in pushing me back to the illegal retail business. In the legal retail store where I worked, people often talked about loyalty and care for their customers, but I don’t think they understood what this means. In the illegal industry, loyalty and care are much stronger and more intense than anything I encountered in legal retail. Over the years I have built a network of about 100 people who kindly buy from me. We have become real friends with real connections and developed a level of deep care for one another. These connections and friendships with my clients made it very hard for me to give up the business and their friendship in the process.

I’m happy that I listened to your book.

Elijah

After receiving this e-mail from Elijah, I searched the Internet and found a few free downloadable versions of my audiobook and a few scanned copies of the printed version (which, I have to admit, were high-quality scans, including the front and back covers, all the credits and references, and even the copyright notices, which I particularly appreciated).

No matter where you stand on the “information wants to be free” ideological spectrum, seeing your own work distributed for free without permission makes the whole issue of illegal downloads feel a bit more personal, less abstract, and more complex. On the one hand, I’m very happy that people are reading about my research and hopefully benefitting from it. The more the merrier—after all, that is why I write. On the other hand, I also understand the annoyance of those whose work is being illegally copied and sold. Thankfully I have a day job, but I am certain that if I were to rely on writing as my main source of income, illegal downloads would be less of an intellectual curiosity and much more difficult to swallow.

As for Elijah, I think we made a fair exchange. Sure, he illegally copied my audiobook (and made some money in the process), but I learned something interesting about loyalty and care for customers in the illegal industry and even got an idea for possible future research.

WITH ALL OF this in mind, how can we fight our own moral deterioration, the what-the-hell effect, and the potential of one transgressive act to result in long-term negative effects on our morality? Whether we deal with fashion or other domains of life, it should be clear that one immoral act can make another more likely and that immoral acts in one domain can influence our morality in other domains. That being the case, we should focus on early signs of dishonest behaviors and do our best to cut them down in their budding stages before they reach full bloom.

AND WHAT ABOUT the Prada bag that started this whole research project? I made the only possible rational decision: I gave it to my mother.