She is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine and of all for a bare shilling and her luck-penny
His view was that 1% of people would never steal, another 1% would always try to steal, and the rest of us are honest as long as we’re not easily tempted. Locks remove temptation for most people. And that’s good, because in our research over many years, we’ve found that everybody has the capacity to be dishonest and almost everybody is at some point or another. […]
People are able to cheat more when they cheat for other people. In some experiments, people cheated the most when they didn’t benefit at all. […]
Small dishonesties matter because they can lead to larger ones. Once you behave badly, at some point, you stop thinking of yourself as a good person at that level and you say, What the hell. […]
We think if we make the punishments harsh enough, people will cheat less. But there is no evidence that this approach works. Think of the death penalty.
