Francesca Gino – Compliance Building

Does it Matter Where the Signature Is?

Just about every compliance certification has the employee sign at the bottom. We have been signing letters and contracts at the end for millenia.

But maybe there is a way to increase ethical performance by moving that signature to the top.

Lisa L. Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino, Dan Ariely, and Max H. Bazerman recently published a paper that found differences in compliance/ethical performance depending on whether the participant signed first or at the end.

In one experiment, the subjects took a test and scored it themselves. They would be paid based on their performance and reimbursed for their expenses incurred in attending the test. After self-scoring the test they went into another room to self report their income on a tax form. There were three forms:

One with a certification at the beginning that all information is true
A second with the same certification, but at the end
A third with no certification

The test and reporting was set up to be very easy to cheat, with a simple and immediate cash reward for cheating. You should not be surprised that cheating was rampant.

With the third form, with no certification, cheating occurred 64% of the time. With the certification at the bottom, the cheating actually rose to 79%. The winner, with the certification at the beginning, only had a 37% cheat rate.

Moving the certification to the beginning had a dramatic, positive effect on reducing cheating.

The paper includes several other similar experiments with the same results. A slightly different test involved word puzzles. Those that signed an honesty pledge before engaging in the cheating experiment ended up solving more of the ethics-related words than the others.

The authors theorize that the certification at the top pre-sets the person to start thinking more ethically. If they don’t hit the certification until the end, they have already supplied the information with whatever ethical slant they may have.

I’m going to re-think how I design my certification. At the top will be a certification that all of the information is true and correct, before they start filling in the information.

Sources:

Signing at the Top: The Key to Preventing Tax Fraud? by Carmen Nobel
When to Sign on the Dotted Line? Signing First Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-Reports by Lisa L. Shu, Nina Mazar, Francesca Gino, Dan Ariely, and Max H. Bazerman

Cheap Sunglasses and Compliance

Can cheap sunglasses affect your ethical behavior?

An important part of a compliance program is monitoring and improving the ethical behavior of your workforce. I’m always intrigued by ethics experiments.

Francesca Gino of Chapel Hill, Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely of Duke tested the effect of wearing knock-off designer sunglasses. They wanted to see if knowing you were wearing knock-offs would affect your behavior.

It did. Those subjects told they were wearing knock-off designer sunglasses cheated more than those who were not told.

The scientists asked two groups of young women to wear sunglasses taken from a box labeled either “authentic” or “counterfeit.” (All the eyewear was authentic.) Then the researchers put the participants in situations in which it was both easy and tempting to cheat.

People still cheat when its easy and tempting. Of those in the “authentic” group, 30% inflated their scores. But in the “counterfeit” group 71% inflated their scores.

They ran a bunch of other tests using the same theory that knowingly wearing knock-off designer sunglasses leads to degraded ethical behavior. It seems to have a very significant impact.

A lesson for compliance professionals: Don’t use knock-off goods in your program.

Dan Ariely talks about the findings in this video:

Sources:

Rose-coloured spectacles? in The Economist
Knockoff psychology: I know I’m faking it by Wray Herbert in We’re Only Human
Counterfeit Self by Marina Krakovsky in the New York Times
On Fake YouTube Video by danariely

Image of Knockoff Shades is by sparktography.

Dishonest Deed, Clear Conscience

In the world of compliance, you may sometimes wonder if that code of ethics really works. Lisa L. Shu, Francesca Gino, and Max H. Bazerman presented their research that a code of ethics really can reduce bad behavior: Dishonest Deed, Clear Conscience: Self-Preservation through Moral Disengagement and Motivated Forgetting.

Their studies provided evidence that morality and memory function as sliding scales and are not fixed dimensions of a person. They found that once people behave dishonestly, they disengage, setting off a downward spiral of future bad behavior and increasingly lenient moral codes. They also found that this slippery downward slope can be counteracted with ethical codes, that increase awareness of ethical standards.

If a situation permits dishonesty, then you should expect dishonesty. At the same time, merely reminding employees about established ethical codes, could counteract the effect of a permissible situation.

See: