from SMH http://www.smh.com.au/business/honestly ... 1l19n.html

Honestly, folks - it seems you're not as ethical as you think, Ross Gittins, SMH 1 October 2011

Another long weekend, another personal question: how honest are you? According to the people who study these things, not as much as you think you are. In an experiment in which people were asked to solve puzzles and were paid a set amount for each puzzle they solved, some participants were told to check their answers against an answer sheet, count the number of questions answered correctly, put their answer form through a shredder, report the number of questions they got right to the experimenter and receive the money they had earned. A second group wasn't allowed to shred their answers before reporting how many they got right. Those whose claims about how many they got right couldn't be checked claimed to have got significantly more correct than the second group. Those who cheated probably counted a problem they would have answered correctly if only they hadn't made a careless mistake. Or they counted a problem they would have got right if only they'd had another 10 seconds. In other words, they didn't tell blatant lies, they just gave themselves the benefit of any doubt, bent the rules a little bit in their own favour. They wouldn't have thought they were cheating. When subjects are asked to rate how ethical they are compared with other people on a scale of 0-100, where 50 is average, the average rating is usually about 75. That is, almost all of us consider ourselves to be more ethical than other people. Clearly, that's not possible.

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