A few years ago I received a letter from a woman named Rhonda who attended the University of California at Berkeley. She told me about a problem she’d had in her house and how a little ethical reminder helped her solve it. She was living near campus with several other people—none of
whom knew one another. When the cleaning people came each weekend, they left several rolls of toilet paper in each of the two bathrooms. However, by Monday all the toilet paper would be gone. It was a classic tragedy-of-the-commons situation: because some people hoarded the toilet paper and took more than their fair share, the public re- source was destroyed for everyone else.
whom knew one another. When the cleaning people came each weekend, they left several rolls of toilet paper in each of the two bathrooms. However, by Monday all the toilet paper would be gone. It was a classic tragedy-of-the-commons situation: because some people hoarded the toilet paper and took more than their fair share, the public re- source was destroyed for everyone else.
Rhonda put a note in one of the bathrooms asking people not to remove toilet paper, as it was a shared commodity. To her great satisfaction, one roll reappeared in a few hours, and another the next day. In the other note-free bathroom, however, there was no toilet paper until the following weekend, when the cleaning people returned. This little experiment demonstrates how effective small reminders can be in helping us maintain our ethical standards and, in this case, a fully stocked bathroom.
We took a group of 450 participants and split them into two groups. We asked half of them to try to recall the Ten Commandments and then tempted them to cheat on our matrix task. We asked the other half to try to recall ten books they had read in high school before setting them loose on the matrices and the opportunity to cheat. Among the group who recalled the ten books, we saw the typical widespread but moderate cheating. On the other hand, in the group that was asked to recall the Ten Commandments, we observed no cheating whatsoever. And that was despite the fact that no one in the group was able to recall all of the Ten Commandments. This result was very intriguing. It seemed that merely trying to recall moral standards was enough to improve moral behavior.
In another attempt to test this effect, we asked a group of self-declared atheists to swear on a Bible and then gave them the opportunity to claim extra earnings on the matrix task. What did the atheists do? They did not stray from the straight-and-narrow path.
[Dan Ariely - The Honest Truth About Dishonesty]
In other words - mussar works!!! We even need reminders about things we already know...
