by Rushworth M. Kidder

“Acting is all about honesty,” said comedian George Burns. “If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” According to recent research, however, his punch line is all wrong. It should be, “If you can fake that, you become a fake yourself.” Not as witty, I grant you, but it’s borne out by an intriguing experiment involving 85 college students, fake $300 sunglasses, and some simple arithmetic.

When these students (all female) showed up at the Center for Decision Research at the University of North Carolina, they were told they’d be part of a marketing study evaluating different pairs of sunglasses. They also were told that, in addition to receiving their $1 participant’s fee, they could earn up to $24 more. They started by looking at pictures of a range of products — some counterfeit, some real — and answering questions about them.

Next, a computer assigned them to two groups. Those in one group were told that, based on their answers, they had “a relative preference for counterfeit products.” So they were sent next door, told to pick up a pair of glasses from a box marked “Counterfeit Sunglasses,” and asked to wear them for the rest of the session. The other group got sunglasses from a box of designer eyewear made by Chloe, valued at about $300, which they also wore for the day. In fact, however, the computer had been programmed to deceive. It utterly ignored the students’ answers on the first task, and instead assigned the students randomly.

The groups then were given worksheets covered with little boxes. Each box was a matrix holding 12 double-decimal numbers (like 1.48, 7.37, or 4.96), only two of which added up to an even 10. Their task: Solve as many matrices as they could before the bell rings by circling the two numbers that sum to 10. For every matrix they completed, they’d get an additional 50 cents. When the bell rang, each woman was asked to write down on a collection slip the number of matrices she’d solved, throw her worksheet away in a recycling box, and turn in the slip.

It was a set-up that clearly invited cheating. Without the accompanying worksheet, who knew how many you’d really solved? Why not push your self-reported score a little — and make a bit more money? What the students didn’t know was that the researchers, by analyzing their “thrown away” worksheets, could easily see who had cheated.

Result? Among those wearing the real sunglasses, 30 percent cheated. Among those wearing fakes, 71 percent cheated. That’s an astonishing difference. Put someone knowingly into counterfeit eyewear, in other words, and their propensity to cheat more than doubles.

But was the experiment skewed? Were those fakes so bad that they’d give you a headache and warp your judgment? No. In fact, all of the glasses were real — though the students were led to believe some were fakes. Then did the researchers plant the idea of a “relative preference for counterfeit products,” making the students believe they really did have such a penchant? No. In further tests, the same pattern prevailed even when the wearer was not told she liked fakes, but instead was told she’d randomly been assigned to wear the counterfeits.

The conclusion is inescapable: If you know you’re wearing knock-offs, you’re more apt to cheat. Summarizing their findings for a in the journal Psychological Science, researchers Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton, and Dan Ariely conclude that wearing counterfeits signals “an aspiration to be something one is not.” What’s more, it generates in those wearers “a feeling of a ‘counterfeit self’ that leads them to behave unethically.”

A counterfeit self. It’s a chilling phrase. Clearly this research isn’t about sunglasses. It’s not even about fashion in general. It’s about the impact on oneself of knowingly participating in fraudulent activity. In fact, it’s about what psychologists describe as “self-alienation” versus “authenticity.” When people report that they don’t feel they know themselves very well or are out of touch with the “real me,” they don’t feel a sense of authenticity. That was the basis of a final experiment: The participants assessed themselves through a series of well-tested questions designed to probe self-alienation. Those who responded while wearing fake glasses reported feeling less authentic and more self-alienated than those wearing the real thing.

The lesson? Even the most seemingly innocuous activity — dressing in phony designer jeans, sporting the street-corner Rolex, carrying the knock-off purse — can have a moral impact. While we may believe, in these researchers’ words, that we are “simply getting similar products for less money,” we in fact “may be paying a price in terms of [our] long-term morality.” Put simply, counterfeit selves do counterfeit things, and fakery breeds more fakery.

So what? Well, if that’s what happens when you buy your Gucci loafers from the back of a van, what happens when you look the other way and invest in, say, Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme? Deep down, you sense something’s wrong: Nobody gets this kind of return year after year. But the view is great, even if the sunglasses are fake. And the next time you’re invited to cheat — well, why not?

In a nation awash with counterfeits, that’s a powerful reason for seeking out the real thing — in art, politics, finance, relationships, and everywhere else — even when the phony seems so harmless. Fakery degrades integrity. Authenticity preserves it.

©2010 Institute for Global Ethics

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