There are different names for it, depending upon the situation and one's profession. The straight face test. The embarrassment test. The giggle test. It's a standard often used in making decisions, whether to advance a particular legal argument, make a personnel decision, or the like.
Does the decision under consideration pass the straight face test? In other words, is the decision reasonable enough that it will not engender laughter or disbelief or be considered beyond the pale. But who is the audience? Yourself? Colleagues in the same line of work? Your friends? Higher management? The press? The public? The audience you choose may make a significant difference in the outcome. You may or may not actually be consulting that audience. But you're anticipating how that audience will react if and when it learns of the decision.
With the electronic age, many more decisions reach a far wider audience than in the past. And that means that you had better consider using a broad audience to evaluate the wisdom of your decision, particularly if that decision has a public impact.
Most recently, Rutgers University experienced the dangers of not using a wide audience to evaluate the wisdom of a personnel decision. The men's basketball coach, Mike Rice, behaved in a completely unprofessional way in handling the team's student athletes. And his behavior was videotaped. He was seen pushing athletes, taunting them using gay slurs, and otherwise abusing them and his authority. When his behavior, and the videotape, came to the attention of the school's athletic director last November, AD Tim Pernetti took disciplinary action. The coach was apparently suspended and fined, directed to attend anger management class, and warned that any future repetition of the behavior would lead to termination.
But was that enough? Did Pernetti apply the straight face test to his decision, in terms of whether his actions toward the coach would be deemed sufficient in the eyes of those who learned of it? And, even if he applied the test, did Pernetti use the correct audience? As events turned out, it appears that he did not.
Pernetti states that he thought of terminating the coach when he first saw the videotape but that others with whom he consulted felt "rehabilitation" through discipline and anger management training would suffice. But the videotape reached the public when ESPN aired it. And that changed everything. The coach and the Athletic Director have both left their positions. Rutger's general counsel has also resigned. Public outrage was fierce and, not surprisingly, politicians followed suit.
Some might argue that any reasonable university official, be it the athletic director, personnel manager, or general counsel, would have fired the coach upon viewing the videotape; that the coach's behavior, particularly in today's climate including Rutgers' own recent history involving the suicide of a male student arising from an illicitly taped incident with another male, warranted immediate dismissal regardless of the public's reaction. But not all necessarily agree. Apparently, according to Pernetti, when the coach's misconduct came to the school's attention, "the consensus among school officials at the time was that it didn't warrant dismissal." He wrote in his letter of resignation: “As you know, my first instincts when I saw the
videotape of Coach Rice's behavior was to fire him immediately. However,
Rutgers decided to follow a process involving university lawyers, human
resources professionals, and outside counsel.
[¶] Following
review of the independent investigative report, the consensus was that
university policy would not justify dismissal.” Workplaces often use progressive discipline, which usually calls for less severe sanctions for initial misconduct together with warnings that stiffer penalties up to termination will be given for repeat offenses. To be sure, a policy of progressive discipline does not preclude instant termination for first offenses constituting extreme misconduct. Then, too, Rutgers' decision-makers may have believed that terminating the coach would have negatively affected its men's basketball program. They may have feared that firing the coach would bring his misbehavior into public view at a time when Rutgers was moving to another athletic conference, and that rehabilitation would change the coach's behavior.
Are there lessons to be learned? In today's environment, where videos are easily recorded and posted to YouTube and elsewhere and sensibilities against bullying and mistreatment toward the LGBT community and others have been heightened, those making decisions with a public impact need to take into consideration the likely reaction of the public to those decisions. They should assume that their decisions will at some point become known to a wider audience, including the general public. They not only need to use the straight face test but to apply it to a larger audience than their own colleagues. They need to ask themselves how the public will likely react were it to learn of the decisions and then to make the decisions factoring in this information.
Making decisions with the public's reaction in mind may lead to unfairness in some instances given the excitability of the public and its tendency toward a herd mentality. As such, mature decision-makers need to consider the public's likely reaction but not allow themselves to be stampeded by it. In some instances the decision-makers need to resist bowing to public sentiment, but they had better carefully have thought out their rationale before reaching the final decision and how they will explain it once public reaction ensues. Following progressive discipline, being mindful of treating similarly situated individuals similarly, taking into consideration liability exposure, and applying standards of fairness and common decency are all factors to be considered when making these kinds of decisions.∎
Lance Armstrong celebrates
after winning a stage of the Tour de France in 2003. Robert Feldman, a
leading researcher on the psychology of lying, says that in the case of
Armstrong's deception, "he was pretty confident he could get away with
it."
(Paola Cocco / AFP/Getty Images)
|
Though we profess to hate it,
lying is common, useful and pretty much universal. It is one of the
most durable threads in our social fabric and an important bulwark of
our self-esteem. We start lying by the age of 4 and we do it at least
several times a day, researchers have found. And we get better with
practice.
In short, whatever you think about Lance Armstrong's admission this week that he took performance-enhancing drugs to fuel his illustrious cycling career, the lies he told may be no more persistent or outsized than yours, according to psychologists and others who study deception. They were just more public. And the stakes were bigger.
"People do it because it works," said Robert Feldman, dean of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and a leading researcher on the psychology of lying. "We get away with lies all the time. Usually they're minor: 'I love your tie.' 'You did a great job.' But in some cases they're bigger, and in Armstrong's case, he was pretty confident he could get away with it."
It's not easy to lie. Psychologists and neuroscientists have found that — initially, at least — deceit requires mental exertion for most of us. The effort to reconcile a lie with the truth — or with our notions of ourselves as good people — takes up so much brainpower that as we do it, we may actually forget to perform such effortless acts as blinking.
To sustain a lie over years, and against mounting evidence of its untruth, liars large and small must "develop an infrastructure around it," Feldman said — a litany of justifications that makes it possible to cling to deception and convince ourselves that we are good people in spite of it.
"But as time goes on, it gets easier," Feldman said.
For Armstrong, who has been stripped of seven Tour de France titles and an Olympic bronze medal, the justifications for his long-standing deceit were on full display during two nights of televised interviews with Oprah Winfrey. Acknowledging that he took a forbidden drug that increases oxygen retention in the blood, he noted that his dose was "not a lot." He said he rationalized his illicit use of testosterone by convincing himself that it probably made up for the loss of the male hormone that resulted from his treatment for testicular cancer.
"It's probably a tribute to the human ability to rationalize," said Daniel Ariely, a Duke University behavioral economist and author of the book "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty." "We really have this amazing capacity to tell ourselves the story about why what we're doing doesn't represent dishonesty in any way."
Though we may lavish our indignation on the practice, lying certainly isn't rare. During a 10-minute conversation between two strangers, 60% lied at least once, Feldman reported in a 2002 study in the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology. Those liars told an average of two to three fibs.
Though men were more likely to lie to make themselves feel good, women more often lied to make their conversation partner feel good. Either way, Feldman said, the urge to make oneself likable and competent was a powerful motivator.
To lie in the first place, as well as to keep the lie going over time, requires two things: motivation and justification. Whether the motivation is money, fame, status or the high esteem of others, it must be counterbalanced with enough justification that we can sustain our image of ourselves as good people, said Shaul Shalvi, a psychologist at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.
In his lab in the Negev desert, Shalvi found evidence that when faced with an opportunity to lie, subjects made a quick but precise calculation of that balance. Study participants were shown to a quiet place and given a die to roll. What they came up with on their first roll would determine their reward, they were told: the higher the roll, the more money they would be given.
When given three chances to roll, subjects frequently lied, reporting not the value of their first roll but of their highest roll, Shalvi and colleagues found. But when they had only one chance to roll the die, far fewer of them lied: Given a single, clear outcome, subjects could not "fudge" the truth with the justification that they had, after all, gotten a higher number at some point in the game. The results were published last year in the journal Psychological Science.
For Lance Armstrong, Shalvi said, the decision to lie could have been easy. With much to gain — and hence, high motivation — Armstrong could tell himself he was inspiring people with his story of triumph over cancer; that he was using his fame and money to help cancer patients and find a cure; that he was universally admired for his grit and his skill as an athlete and a team leader.
Armstrong probably drew on these lofty accomplishments not only to justify his denials of using banned substances, Shalvi said: They would probably have been a crucial piece of personal armor as Armstrong lashed out at those who crossed him, telling lies and filing lawsuits that hurt teammates and backers.
Not all of us tell lies so big, or for so long, Shalvi said. Some of us are also cognitively better equipped to lie — and therefore, more likely to do so.
In a series of experiments, Ariely and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School assessed a wide range of cognitive skills in a group of volunteers and then put them through a battery of challenges that gave them ample opportunity to lie and cheat. Those subjects who had scored highest on attributes such as creativity and flexible thinking — but not intelligence — were most likely to engage in deceitful behavior. And when subjects were encouraged to think creatively as they completed the tasks, they were more likely to take shortcuts and stray from the truth.
"Not only do naturally creative people cheat more than uncreative people," Ariely and Gino wrote in a 2011 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Subjects cajoled into thinking outside the box became cheaters too. This suggests that the creative process isn't just tied to dishonest behavior: It actually enables it."
People who are highly creative appear to have the vision and the flexibility of mind to find justifications for their deceptions, and quickly, Ariely said. For Armstrong, whose racing style suggests he was creative and flexible in taking advantage of openings to victory, those same qualities might have allowed him freer rein not only in concocting deceptions, but in justifying them to himself.
"This is how lies become self-perpetuating," Ariely said.
melissa.healy@latimes.com
In short, whatever you think about Lance Armstrong's admission this week that he took performance-enhancing drugs to fuel his illustrious cycling career, the lies he told may be no more persistent or outsized than yours, according to psychologists and others who study deception. They were just more public. And the stakes were bigger.
"People do it because it works," said Robert Feldman, dean of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and a leading researcher on the psychology of lying. "We get away with lies all the time. Usually they're minor: 'I love your tie.' 'You did a great job.' But in some cases they're bigger, and in Armstrong's case, he was pretty confident he could get away with it."
It's not easy to lie. Psychologists and neuroscientists have found that — initially, at least — deceit requires mental exertion for most of us. The effort to reconcile a lie with the truth — or with our notions of ourselves as good people — takes up so much brainpower that as we do it, we may actually forget to perform such effortless acts as blinking.
To sustain a lie over years, and against mounting evidence of its untruth, liars large and small must "develop an infrastructure around it," Feldman said — a litany of justifications that makes it possible to cling to deception and convince ourselves that we are good people in spite of it.
"But as time goes on, it gets easier," Feldman said.
For Armstrong, who has been stripped of seven Tour de France titles and an Olympic bronze medal, the justifications for his long-standing deceit were on full display during two nights of televised interviews with Oprah Winfrey. Acknowledging that he took a forbidden drug that increases oxygen retention in the blood, he noted that his dose was "not a lot." He said he rationalized his illicit use of testosterone by convincing himself that it probably made up for the loss of the male hormone that resulted from his treatment for testicular cancer.
"It's probably a tribute to the human ability to rationalize," said Daniel Ariely, a Duke University behavioral economist and author of the book "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty." "We really have this amazing capacity to tell ourselves the story about why what we're doing doesn't represent dishonesty in any way."
Though we may lavish our indignation on the practice, lying certainly isn't rare. During a 10-minute conversation between two strangers, 60% lied at least once, Feldman reported in a 2002 study in the journal Basic and Applied Social Psychology. Those liars told an average of two to three fibs.
Though men were more likely to lie to make themselves feel good, women more often lied to make their conversation partner feel good. Either way, Feldman said, the urge to make oneself likable and competent was a powerful motivator.
To lie in the first place, as well as to keep the lie going over time, requires two things: motivation and justification. Whether the motivation is money, fame, status or the high esteem of others, it must be counterbalanced with enough justification that we can sustain our image of ourselves as good people, said Shaul Shalvi, a psychologist at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.
In his lab in the Negev desert, Shalvi found evidence that when faced with an opportunity to lie, subjects made a quick but precise calculation of that balance. Study participants were shown to a quiet place and given a die to roll. What they came up with on their first roll would determine their reward, they were told: the higher the roll, the more money they would be given.
When given three chances to roll, subjects frequently lied, reporting not the value of their first roll but of their highest roll, Shalvi and colleagues found. But when they had only one chance to roll the die, far fewer of them lied: Given a single, clear outcome, subjects could not "fudge" the truth with the justification that they had, after all, gotten a higher number at some point in the game. The results were published last year in the journal Psychological Science.
For Lance Armstrong, Shalvi said, the decision to lie could have been easy. With much to gain — and hence, high motivation — Armstrong could tell himself he was inspiring people with his story of triumph over cancer; that he was using his fame and money to help cancer patients and find a cure; that he was universally admired for his grit and his skill as an athlete and a team leader.
Armstrong probably drew on these lofty accomplishments not only to justify his denials of using banned substances, Shalvi said: They would probably have been a crucial piece of personal armor as Armstrong lashed out at those who crossed him, telling lies and filing lawsuits that hurt teammates and backers.
Not all of us tell lies so big, or for so long, Shalvi said. Some of us are also cognitively better equipped to lie — and therefore, more likely to do so.
In a series of experiments, Ariely and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School assessed a wide range of cognitive skills in a group of volunteers and then put them through a battery of challenges that gave them ample opportunity to lie and cheat. Those subjects who had scored highest on attributes such as creativity and flexible thinking — but not intelligence — were most likely to engage in deceitful behavior. And when subjects were encouraged to think creatively as they completed the tasks, they were more likely to take shortcuts and stray from the truth.
"Not only do naturally creative people cheat more than uncreative people," Ariely and Gino wrote in a 2011 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "Subjects cajoled into thinking outside the box became cheaters too. This suggests that the creative process isn't just tied to dishonest behavior: It actually enables it."
People who are highly creative appear to have the vision and the flexibility of mind to find justifications for their deceptions, and quickly, Ariely said. For Armstrong, whose racing style suggests he was creative and flexible in taking advantage of openings to victory, those same qualities might have allowed him freer rein not only in concocting deceptions, but in justifying them to himself.
"This is how lies become self-perpetuating," Ariely said.
melissa.healy@latimes.com