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Dan Ariely, The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone-Especially Ourselves. HarperCollins Publishers, 2012, 285 pp., ` 399, ISBN 978-0-00-749056-1 DOI: 10.1177/0972262912483993
Dishonesty is so grasping it would deceive God himself, were it possible.
-George Bancroft
This is the third book by Dan Ariely, the previous two books were, The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic and Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. First book by Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions (2008) was about Irrationality. His second book, The Upside of Irrationality was also an attempt to capture the complexity of humans' irrationalities but mainly the other side of irrationality which was quite positive rather than negative.
Through this book, Dan Ariely has revealed or one can say he has explored the dark side of human nature. The protagonist of this book is 'dishonesty'. Considering, dis- honesty is a widespread problem, the author focuses in this book on the fact that people are prone to be dishonest or they lie to everyone especially to themselves when given the opportunity.
The main purpose of this book is to look at the rational cost benefit forces that are supposed to drive dishonest behaviour, but, according to author, they often do not and the irrational forces that we think don't matter but often they do matter.
This book is about his fascination of issues like cheating and dishonesty. He thought through these issues questions like what is the human capacity for both honesty and dis- honesty? Whether dishonesty is a widespread problem? Initially he tried to explain about the causes of dishonesty by Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC). His concern was if...