Published: May 08, 2008 04:53 pm            

STAWAR: Living in a prevarication nation

When our daughter was about 3, my wife Diane and I were driving when we suddenly heard munching noises coming from the rear of the car. Then we remembered that we had left a bag of Oreos sitting on the back seat. We asked, “Sally, are you eating those cookies?” We turned around to see Sally, her face smeared with chocolate cookie crumbs, slowly shaking her head “no.” We thought it was cute.

They say we learn to lie when we are about 3 or 4 years old and don't stop until we are lying on our deathbeds saying we are fine.

To my dismay, I recently discovered that I had been lied to by the director of another not-for-profit organization. This was not so cute. After Enron, WorldCom and all the other business scandals, you may well ask why should this surprise me? After all, research shows that people admit that they lie pretty much all the time. Studies by University of Virginia psychologist Bella DePaulo and her colleagues reveal that on the average, people admit to telling one or two major fibs every day.

But I still can't figure out why someone I hardly know would go out of his way to call me up long distance just to tell me he had no intention of bidding on a local contract and then turn around and bid on it anyway. Reflecting on this I've thought that perhaps this man didn't intend to lie when he called, but later changed his mind and was too embarrassed or cowardly to call me back. Or maybe he was just snooping and improvised to put me off my guard. As you can see, I haven't found any good way to rationalize his actions

I should be getting used to this by now. Earlier this year I attended a court proceeding and heard another director tell at least two major lies on the stand while under oath. And this wasn't simply slanting things to improve appearances, but big whoppers. I was naïve enough to believe that the threat of perjury or maybe the fear of God would prevent such things.

The term “business ethics” has evolved into an oxymoron, like “jumbo shrimp,” “terribly good”, or “Microsoft Works”. Sociologist Amitai Etzoni has described the great difficulty he encountered teaching ethics in business schools. In one school a senior faculty member in the marketing department said that they might as well close down his whole program if they started teaching ethics. Dominated by economics, Professor Etonzi found that business schools taught a worldview in which people always seek to serve their own self-interest by maximizing their pleasure, or in the case of corporations, their profits

At Harvard Business School, Etonzi found that his MBA students firmly believed that “if one company is 100 percent efficient and pays no mind to ethical consideration and another company does, the first company will drive the second out of business.” The students also assumed that companies could not “afford ethics” unless it was for PR purposes. Some ethically challenged companies cynically establish ethics training for their own employees, so they will treat the company honestly. This is like the law-breaking gangster rap artists telling fans not to download their music on-line because that would be “stealing”.

To me, all of this is very discouraging. For years I had idealistically thought that things were different in the not-for-profit world. But we are always being told to run our organizations like a business and I'm afraid too many of my colleagues have taken this to heart.

Lying in the business world, however, is just an extension of our everyday behavior. DePaulo's research shows that lying occurs in more than 20 percent of routine social interactions. A majority of the lies that people tell have to do with themselves and most are to meet psychological needs, rather than for material gain. About a quarter of lies are to protect the feelings of someone else. People report getting caught in their lies less than 15 percent of the time and 75 percent of us say that we would lie again if given the chance.

I had assumed that women lied less then men. Humorist Roy Blount Jr. tells the story of the man receiving marriage counseling who complained to the therapist that going to counseling was easier for his wife because she didn't have to lie. However the actual data suggest that men and women tell about the same numbers of lies.

We tend to lie to our healthcare professionals, especially about things like smoking, exercise, and especially flossing. No one wants to be lectured to and we all worry about being judged badly.

Lying often takes places when people apply for jobs. In one survey of personnel directors, 57 percent said that they have caught a lie on an applicant's resume. Only 5 percent of workers, however, say that they fib on their resumes, but then again, can we believe them?

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld said that going on a first date is like having a four-hour job interview, so it's not surprising that dating couples lie in one-third of all their interactions, according to DePaulo's research. Most of this sort of lying is what has been termed “impression management” - trying to control what other people think about you.

Over time lying and ethical breaches take their toll, both on individuals and organizations. Employees who rate their company's ethics as unfavorable are significantly less committed to their jobs than employees who give their companies high marks. Also, 70 percent of consumers say that they would not do business with any company that they knew was unethical.

Although most of us have some remorse about our lying, we still have a problem taking responsibility for our behavior. We are like the 4-year-old in one study who said, “I didn't break the lamp and I won't do it again”.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget found that preschoolers believe that a lie about a 100 pound canary is twice as bad as a lie about a 50 ponder and should be punished twice as much. Using this standard and given the price of Oreos at the time, the director's lie to me was about 250,000 times as bad as Sally's lie about the cookies, so as a proper punishment this fellow should not be allowed any dessert until 2791 A.D.



Terry L. Stawar, Ed.D., lives in Georgetown and is the CEO of LifeSpring in Jeffersonville. He can be reached at tstawar@lifespr.com or ( 812) 206-1234.

        

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