Why Telling the Truth Is Harder (and More Important) Than Ever with Christian B. Miller

0:03Thank you for joining us for episode 571 of Live Happy Now. It's no secret that we're living in a time when we're being challenged by misinformation and deception. And this week's guest is doing something about it. I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm joined by Christian B. Miller, the A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. His books and articles have focused heavily on morality and virtues, and he directed The Honesty Project, one of the largest research initiatives ever undertaken on honesty. His latest book, The Honesty Crisis, looks at six specific areas where dishonesty is rampant, and he connects the dots on how that erodes our trust in institutions and in each other.

0:45Today, we talk about what honesty means, how this honesty crisis is affecting us, and what we can do about it. Let's have a listen. Christian, thank you so much for joining me today on Live Happy Now. Thank you so much for having me on your show. This is going to be a fantastic conversation. Your latest book is The Honesty Crisis, and wow, is that a timely topic. I know that you've written in the past about morality and character, and I wanted to learn a little bit about how all that led into writing about honesty. I'm a philosophy professor at Wake Forest University. I've been working on the topic of virtue and character for pretty much 20 years.

1:20And I was thinking about it from a very broad perspective, just what is virtue? What is character writ large? And I was thinking, how can we foster a better character? What does our character look like these days empirically? What does the psychological research tell us? And that sustained me for a while. But then I said what I wanted to say, both for the academics and for the popular audience. And I was looking for something different, but related, not completely different. And I seized upon honesty because, strikingly, almost no one in my world of academic philosophy was talking about honesty.

1:54I don't know why that was, but two articles written in the last 50 years, nothing in book form. And at the same time, every day I'm confronted in the news with some, usually negative, unfortunately, story about honesty. So how can I reconcile this disparity? Well, as a philosopher, at least I want to jump in there and say something constructive, trying to get more clear about why we should care about honesty, why it's important, and what is it even in the first place. So I transitioned about five years ago to exclusively focusing on this, what I would call a neglected virtue in my world, and trying to get it no longer neglected.

2:28Now, what do you find most interesting about the topic of honesty? So for me as a philosopher, I'm interested in just what it is in the first place. I don't know if this is the most interesting thing, but I find it very interesting. It's so tempting to think of it as just a matter of telling the truth. When I speak in front of an audience, I say, tell me what honesty is. It's not lying and it's telling the truth. And that is one part of it, but it's only one, I would say actually small part of what honesty is. It's actually much more rich and multifaceted and nuanced virtue than we typically appreciate.

3:00So honesty works against lying, of course, but also works against cheating. It works against stealing. It works against breaking your promises. It works against fraud, self-deception, hypocrisy, BSing, just all down the line, one after another of these things. And so it turns out that honesty covers a tremendous amount of moral territory, maybe more than any other virtue there is, in preventing these bad forms of behavior. Even that isn't all there is to honesty. There's the heart behind the behavior as well as the behavior itself. So why are you telling the truth? Why are you not cheating? That matters too.

3:39And so you could have someone who reliably tells the truth in lots of different situations and yet fails to be honest because they're doing it for what I would call self-interested or self-seeking motivations. If you're really trying to be a virtuous person in general and a virtuous, honest person in particular, your heart has to be not focused on yourself. Will honesty help me get a promotion? Will it keep me from being fired? Will I get rewards in the afterlife? Will it overcome my guilt? But rather, you need to be focused on something larger than yourself. You need to be focused on what's good for other people.

4:17You need to be focused on what's right and wrong, what's good and bad, what's virtuous and vicious. And so that kind of perspective takes us out of our probably natural inward focus, benefiting ourselves, outwardly pushes us to care about others, and has to be there as part of what it is to be an honest person. So to sum it up, I started by thinking it was just a matter of telling the truth. I came to discover that it's much more interesting and nuanced and rich than that. Yeah, I was surprised to see how complicated honesty really is. It's a, what, 266-page book, is that correct? That sounds right to me.

4:55Yeah, so it's not the slim volume of, oh, here's what it is, here's five things you can do. And the motivation aspect really fascinated me because I've not seen that touched on. And that's not something we're taught either. We're taught tell the truth. And as you said, it's if you lie, you're going to hell. If there's always a consequence, there's something bad that's going to happen if you're dishonest. So can we dive into just a little bit the idea of those motivations and how do we do that self-examination to know what our motivations are? Yeah, good, good. So I think as a philosopher thinking about character in general, every virtue is going to work this way.

5:35Honesty is not a special case. When we go courage, patience, justice, compassion, all down the line, motivation matters as well as behavior. But let's dive in a little bit more to honesty specifically. I think you can carve up motivation into three categories. There's motivation, let's say, to tell the truth, because it benefits myself. That's self-interested motivation. And we've already given a couple of examples of that, including the one you just gave to avoid punishment, either in this life or the next life. That's a self-interested motivation. Another category is selfless motivation, altruistic motivation, motivation concerned with the good of someone or other people in general.

6:17So I tell the truth because I care about this person or because they're my friend or because I don't want to hurt them with a lie. And then there's a third category, which is more impersonal or abstract motivation. So examples would be, I tell the truth because it's the right thing to do, or because morality requires it, or because God commands me, or because what would happen if everyone were to do this. Lie, for example. So that's a more impersonal kind of motivation. And I think to sum this up, self-interested motivation has got to be off the table. If that's what's primarily driving you to do these honest actions, you don't get to count as virtuously honest.

6:56The other two, though, I think are fine. So if I make a new example, if my student comes to me and says, hey, I saw a lot of people cheating on the test, but I didn't do it. And I asked them, the students, well, why didn't you do it? I'm so happy you didn't. That's very impressive. But why didn't you do it? And they say, because I knew that cheating was the wrong thing to do. That's fine. Or they say, because I respect you as a professor. That's fine. Or because an honest person wouldn't do that. That's fine. So lots of these examples would, motivation would be fine, so long as they're not self-focused.

7:30And then to briefly tackle the other side of your question, well, unfortunately, we are not infallible guides to our own motivation. So we can look into our minds and we can think, why did I do that? What was my reason? And hopefully the majority of the time we figure it out accurately. But we know from empirical research and from our own experience that we often deceive ourselves too. Plus there's unconscious or under the radar motivation. So I don't think we're ever going to be perfect about this, but we do a reasonably good job of figuring out what our motivation is. Sometimes it's after the fact, like I just do the thing, I tell the truth.

8:07And then afterwards I say, why did I do that? And I can, at that point, confabulate, I can come up with some like nice story. Oh, I did it. Yeah, of course I did it for a good reason because it's the right thing to do. But hopefully we can discover afterwards, this was in fact my motive and it was a virtuous motive. And then we're in good shape. I have no solution now, as far as how to get people to be better at figuring out their own motivations, That's a problem in psychology that's been around for 100 years. And so are you saying that a little white lie, like every husband has heard, does this make me look fat?

8:42What's the answer? Is it OK? Is a little white lie OK? Yeah. White lies are notorious for, first of all, their lies. But there were comparatively littles at stake. We're not mad at like saving innocent lives or national security or anything like that. My view here is that I don't want to give a blanket answer. I think probably in some cases, they're going to be okay, especially if you know the other person's in a precarious mental situation at the time. Maybe they're going through some struggles mentally, and you know that an honest remark might tip them over the edge, then I'm going to be reticent to advocate for honesty.

9:19But I think a lot of the times we think it's okay and it's not. Here are some reasons. It comes with a lot of costs when you tell a white lie to a person. One cost is that, well, the person's going to go ahead and do the thing you're lying about. So they're going to wear that thing or they're going to continue to make that dessert. So you're going to have to put up with it in the future. You're also going to have to remember that you told the lie so that you don't get caught later having told a lie earlier. You're going to have to keep it a secret from third party. So you're going to not reveal what you really think to the kids or to your best friend and whatnot because they might let the truth slip out.

9:57And these kinds of things are costly. They make what might seem like a quick momentary decision to tell a lie. They actually make it a much more demanding investment in dishonesty. So that is not how we are normally psychologically wired. So in chapter two of the book, I talk about truth default theory. Our normal default tendency, and this is on empirical grounds, is to tell the truth. When we lie, that actually takes more psychological resources and energy. That's not how we're naturally disposed. And then that energy has to be continually invested in the future to keep the lie from being discovered.

10:34If it is, that can break trust with the other person. That's yet another cost that could come along with the white light. You could erode the relationship if it's discovered and break trust with that other person. So I think lots of reasons to be cautious, although I would not blanket prohibit it. It's like individual cases. We got a case by case example. I think a lot of morality works that way in general. I don't think there's one simple moral rule, for example, for all moral behavior. I think we need to look at particular cases and weigh up the considerations in those particular cases to determine what the correct answer is.

11:08If our instinct is to tell the truth, then why do we have such a problem with honesty in today's world? I mean, it's easier than ever to be dishonest. We have more ways to do it. And as you've discussed, it's not just about lying. It's misleading. It's self-deception. It's cheating, things like that. So has honesty become more difficult in today's world because of the environment we're in? Yeah, I think that's exactly right. So here's the glass half full story and the glass half empty story. So the glass half full story is that it's a good thing that we default to true telling. I'd rather it be that than defaulting into lying or defaulting into being neutral.

11:48So the research in the last 10 years has found that overwhelmingly, most people don't tell lies most of the time. So in one particular study, 60 % of people reported not telling a lie in the last 24 hours. Not a single law. Well, that's good. Yeah. And the majority of the lies that we're told, we're told by 5 % of the participants. There's a small group that tells a lot of lies most people otherwise don't. However, that's the positive side. Now we come to the other side. There are situational environmental factors that can make dishonesty more tempting. And the one that runs as undercurrent throughout my book is technology.

12:27So no surprise. Technology, I think, is neutral in and of itself. and the internet, your cell phone, whatever it might be, is neutral. However, it enables us to do things we might not have been able to do before. And it gives us capacities to be honest or dishonest. Unfortunately, though, what's happening is that it's giving us capacities to be dishonest in ways that are really easy, that makes dishonesty really easy. It also makes it very tempting. And finally, it makes it really hard to detect. So to make it less abstract, because I know that's It's pretty abstract. Real quick, create illustration.

13:03Student cheating has been around since there were classrooms. Probably before. Probably before, yeah. The internet comes along. The internet's neutral. It's not good or bad. It's neutral. But it provides abilities and capacities for students to go online and get material put into their paper. Now, of course, the next wave is AI. You only have to go and search around. You just give this tool the prompt, the length, a stylistic suggestion, and it'll write your paper for you within a span of 10 seconds, and I'll probably be a paper better than what you could write yourself and get you a higher grade than you would get otherwise.

13:37So it's now go back to what we're saying, a piece of technology that makes dishonesty very easy, very tempting, and at least at the current moment, almost impossible to detect. That's a bad formula when it comes to trying to preserve honesty in our society. And for students who are trying to be honest, but they're saying, okay, my buddy over here who is a C student, and now he's going to write this paper and he's going to get an A, I'm a B student, and that's about as good as I can do a paper on. It takes away, it seems, some of the incentive for honesty because it's almost like you're going to be punished for not doing what the others are doing.

14:22100%, very good observation. So when you look at the research on predictors of student cheating, the number one predictor is perceived cheating by other students. It's not the difficulty of the test or your GPA or needing to get into graduate school or something like that. The number one predictor of whether a student will cheat is whether they perceive, rightly or wrongly, other students in their environment cheating as well. If they perceive that, they think they're going to be left behind. And it's very hard at that point for them to overcome the temptation to join the crowd because we have this kind of crowd mentality often.

14:58We follow the crowd and cheat as well. So that's kind of depressing facts, but it's well validated now. We'll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

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16:09And now, let's hear more from Christian Miller. it's not just in schools it also happens in the workplace people i think don't see it as wrong because it's so accessible it's just they're using it they perceive it as a tool to help them do their job better so what's that fine line and where do we go from here there are cases where it is clearly wrong and then we can talk about what to do if a professor is very clear i want this paper to be your own work, and the student turns in a paper generated by an AI without disclosing that AI use, then it's clearly violating the professor's expectations.

16:51And so now that counts as plagiarism. So it's plagiarizing from another source without giving credit. It's dishonest, and it's morally wrong. So I think in situations like that, and that would apply to the workplace too, if the boss or the team leader or something expects original work and doesn't get it, the same kind of thing happens. What do you do about it? In the book, I talk about a variety of different honesty crises. This is one we're focusing on now. For some of them, I do think there are concrete steps and practical initiatives we can explore. So I'm optimistic in some areas. Alas, I'm not so optimistic in this area.

17:28What can you do to try and inspire people and draw on the good sides of the character to kind of motivate them for good reasons to produce their own work. I think there are things you can do, but they're just not going to be effective enough. You can have things like an honor code or in the work environment, their ethics codes. And you can have every assignment or work product have an honesty pledge attached to it. This worked quite effectively prior to the internet, even worked with the internet in the educational context. These honor codes work quite effectively. There's good data to back them up.

18:04I just don't think they're going to be, these days, effective enough to rein in temptation to use AI on a grade assignment. So to now finish this, at least in the education context, I'll focus there. I think you have to do what most of my colleagues are doing, which is take AI out of the student's hands, literally, by bringing the graded work entirely into the classroom. You're grading what? Blue Book exams. like the old-fashioned blue book exams. You're having them do quizzes in class. You're maybe give an oral exam individually to each student. You maybe have writing assignments, but they're in-class writing assignments.

18:44So they have to, they get the prompt and then they spend the entire class writing in response to the prompt, maybe over multiple class meetings, scaffolding the assignments. All these kinds of things, well, they cannot literally have the technology with them. So it removes that obstacle. So those are great solutions that we can use for technology. But some of the other things that you talk about are more difficult, like fake news. The problems we have, you talked about it with the clergy. We talked about it with politicians. We're just swimming in dishonesty. And that makes us feel sometimes like everyone's dishonest.

19:19When we see the news, you just start feeling like, well, everybody's lying. Nobody's telling the truth. So why does honesty still matter? Yeah. So I would first encourage people to resist that impression. One side of what you're saying is an empirical description of how we feel today. And I think you're right. We can feel that there's dishonesty everywhere. And if I'm not part of that, I'm falling behind. It's kind of like the student case. I would encourage listeners to resist the temptation to think that way. My reading overall of what psychology tells us about people's character is that not that most people are dishonest, is that they're situationally honest and dishonest.

20:04They're sometimes honest, sometimes dishonest, that we're a mixed bag of good and bad. And so that's more encouraging than the other alternative of thinking everyone's dishonest. Now, the richer philosophical question is, okay, well, what we don't have today is widespread honesty. Why should we care about trying to foster widespread honesty? Why should we care? Why we're so busy? Why is this important? Why does it matter such that we should invest in this, whether we happen to be mixed, whether we happen to be dishonest ourselves, and same thing with our society. And so I think we can go a number of different routes.

20:41I'll mention a couple of them, but I'll dive deeper into just one or two of them. We could go a kind of religious route. For people who are religious, there are going to be resources in every world religion I'm familiar with for thinking that honesty is really important. So we could explore that. We could explore it from a societal lens. Why is it important for our society to be a place of honesty? We could explore it from an individual lens. Why is it important to me and my health and well-being and flourishing for me, to be honest? So at the societal level, I think this is the most straightforward case.

21:13Imagine what it would look like to live in a society where dishonesty really was rampant. In that kind of case, you couldn't trust other people because, well, they're probably going to cheat you or steal from you or lie to you. So how could you trust them? You couldn't respect other people and they're not going to respect you because everyone's going to instrumentalize each other to take advantage of them for their own purposes. You couldn't have genuine relationships because the only relationships you would have would be transactional ones where you're using others for your own benefits, honestly or dishonestly.

21:47And I think significantly, you would live in a state of fear. You couldn't have peace and comfort. It'd be hard to sleep at night because you know everyone else around you is dishonest. They can take advantage of you at any moment. That's also related to the trust. So when I want to live in a society where there's rampant fear, when I want to live myself a life of fear. No, that's awful. Okay, so I think the societal case is pretty clear. The individual case is trickier. So when I think of myself, okay, I'm going to live in a society where there's honesty. But that doesn't mean automatically that I have to be honest.

22:22Now, there are some things to note right away, advantages of honesty. So there's empirical research in this too. Things like it's correlated with improved physical health, improved mobility, for example, lower risk of lung disease, lower risk of depression, increases, or honestly, that is, reduces cognitive load, decreases stress, lower stress hormones. So I'm just kind of recycling some things on a list. So in those ways, you could think that is actually beneficial for me. Absolutely. It gives me these nice benefits. Now, here comes the caveat, because you're talking to a philosopher. So if I was just a psychologist, I would give you these studies and tell you the empirical results and we'll be good to go.

23:05You're talking to a philosopher though. So the philosopher in me knows that going all the way back to Plato, there has been this worry that maybe the best life of all is a two-faced life or a double life where you're publicly honest and good because you reap the societal benefits of being a good person. You're praised, commended, respected by society. but in private, when no one's looking and you're sure you can get away with it, you do dishonest things for your advantage. Connected to the topics in the book, maybe you cheat on the test when you know you can get away with it. Maybe you look at the pornography or whatever in a relationship when you know your significant other is not going to catch you.

23:50Maybe you do some financial misdoing. Wouldn't that be the best life of all? You reap the benefits of public acclaim. And in a private life, you get to have self-interested pleasures when no one's looking. That has always been a worry that has to be addressed if you're making the case for honesty. Last thing I'll end with there is that I think you can make the case against that kind of life, that double life, the life of fakery, which we've seen celebrities been caught in. We probably know people who've been caught in that in our personal lives and be caught in that life, one thing stands out to me that's missing, and that is genuine relationships.