The Fudge Factor

Almost everyone is honest, and almost everyone cheats—and the gap between those two facts is the most important thing Dan Ariely ever studied, including, as it turned out, about himself. The mechanism he named the fudge factor operates through a specific and stable dynamic: people cheat only up to the boundary where they can still tell themselves a story in which they are honest people. We stop short of the amount that would force revision of our self-image. The constraint on dishonesty is not the fear of getting caught; it is the need to maintain a flattering account of ourselves. Ariely demonstrated this through the matrix task, where subjects who shredded their own answer sheets reported a few more correct solutions than they had actually solved—not many more, not all of them, but consistently and almost universally a few more—while expressing, when asked, sincere confidence in their own honesty. The fudge factor explains the sociology of