The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest

Summary

New Books Network Podcast
Episode: The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World
Host: Dr. Christina Gessler
Guest: Dr. Christian Miller
Date: June 25, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode features a conversation between host Dr. Christina Gessler and Dr. Christian Miller, author of The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. Dr. Miller, a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, discusses the origins, nuances, and real-world implications of honesty as a virtue, as well as the escalating “honesty crisis” in different sectors of modern society. The episode dives into the societal and personal costs of dishonesty, recent research on honesty and dishonesty, the role of motivation, and practical steps for fostering honesty both individually and collectively.

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Guest Introduction & Book Genesis

Dr. Christian Miller describes his background and academic focus:

• Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University for 21 years ([02:13])
• Research specialty: ethics, philosophy of religion, virtue and character, with recent focus on honesty
• Led the “Honesty Project,” funded by the John Templeton Foundation, a major interdisciplinary study on honesty ([03:28])
• Motivation for book: Noticed a striking academic neglect of honesty, saw honesty “under attack” in society, identified a need for accessible, non-academic discussion ([04:29])

“In my field of philosophy only [two articles about honesty had been] published in 50 years, which is basically nothing and kind of shockingly neglected.” — Dr. Christian Miller ([03:28])

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Importance and Mystery of Honesty

• Honesty as a Central Virtue: Dr. Miller’s research at Wake Forest found that people rate honesty as the #1 trait for liking, respecting, and understanding someone ([07:04]).
• General Understanding vs. Nuance: While most everyone believes honesty matters, few can clearly define it beyond the obvious “truth-telling.”

“Honesty was the most important characteristic out of 60 when it came to liking, respecting, and understanding someone.” — Dr. Christian Miller ([07:04])

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2. Recognizing the Honesty Crisis

• Society recognizes and feels “the honesty crisis” without a philosophical definition ([09:22]).
• Double-edged nature: Dishonesty is both more tempting and easier to get away with than before ([09:22]).
• Six Key Areas at Risk:
  1. Politics (fake news, misinformation)
  2. Education (AI-enabled cheating)
  3. Relationships (online infidelity)
  4. Religion (sermon plagiarism)
  5. Celebrity & Influencer Culture
  6. Technology (deepfakes, AI deception) ([12:19])
• Honesty crises are felt intuitively when societal norms are breached.

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3. Defining Honesty (Conceptual Framework)

Richness and Complexity of Honesty

• Honesty has both behavioral and motivational sides ([13:43]).
• It covers much more than just lying: includes stealing, cheating, hypocrisy, BSing, misleading, promise breaking, and more.
• Dr. Miller’s “Honesty Chart” ([23:11]):
  • Truthfulness
  • Forthrightness
  • Respect for property
  • Proper compliance with rules
  • Integrity and authenticity
• Honest Action = the right act, for the right reasons (non-egoistic motivations).

“You have to have the right kind of motivation behind the behavior as well as the behavior to get... the honesty box checked.” — Dr. Christian Miller ([13:43])

Motivation Behind Honesty

• Egoistic motivation (“I want a reward for returning a wallet”) does not count as virtuous honesty.
• Acceptable motives include:
  • A sense of duty (“it’s the right thing to do”)
  • Altruism or care for others
  • Mixed motives can count as long as the self-interest is secondary ([20:20])

“It does not always have to be pure [motivation]... so long as that second one [self-interest] is very much supplemental, it’s not the main motive, I’m not going to be too picky.” — Dr. Christian Miller ([20:20])

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4. Are Most People Honest or Dishonest?

• Dr. Miller transitions to empirical research ([25:42]):
  • Earlier studies (flawed) suggested 2-3 lies/day per person.
  • Better recent studies show 60% of people report no lies in the last day; 5% of people are responsible for much of the lying.
• Truth Default Theory: Most people have a natural tendency to tell the truth; lying requires extra psychological effort ([25:42]).
• Truth Bias: We tend to expect honesty from others as the default.

“Most people naturally want to tell the truth, and lying takes more effort and it’s more costly psychologically for us to do.” — Dr. Christian Miller ([25:42])

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5. Honesty Crisis in Education: AI & Cheating

• Recent technologies (AI, online tools) have intensified cheating, but cheating’s core psychology is longstanding ([30:18]).
• Three kinds of cheaters:
  1. Ignorant Cheater: Doesn’t know an act is cheating.
  2. Self-Interested Cheater: Knows and does it for gain.
  3. Marginal Cheater: On the fence, influenced by context.
• Classic study: Students cheat more if sure they won’t get caught, but rarely go “all the way” (don’t claim a perfect score). Honor codes and moral reminders greatly reduce cheating ([30:18]).

“They want others to think of themselves as honest and they want to be able to think of themselves as honest people.” — Dr. Christian Miller ([30:18])

Role of the Honor Code

• Honor codes are only effective when students believe in them and feel involved, not just when signing as a formality ([36:14]).
• Faculty and institutional buy-in is essential.
• Mastery mindset (love of learning) & sense of professor caring reduces cheating.

“If a student feels that the professor cares about them, they’re less likely to cheat. And if they feel that a professor is really interested in the material, they’re less likely to cheat.” — Dr. Christina Gessler ([39:27])

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6. Cross-Societal and Personal Costs of the Honesty Crisis

• Consequences of eroding honesty: reduced social trust, weakened relationships, increased societal fear ([44:10]).
• Importance of honesty for functional society: promotes trust, genuine relationships, personal safety.
• Individual reasons to value honesty explored: personal integrity, relational depth, social harmony ([44:10]).

“Honesty will foster trust... will foster genuine relationships of care and depth and sincerity and respect. And it will push back against fear.” — Dr. Christian Miller ([44:10])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On academic neglect:
  “Academics weren't talking about [honesty]. In my field... only two articles in 50 years.” ([03:28])
• On public priorities:
  “Honesty was number one in all three areas... liking, respecting and understanding someone.” ([07:04])
• On why motivation matters:
  “It’s not just a matter of behavior. It also matters a lot why you’re doing the action, what’s motivating you.” ([13:43])
• On messaging of the book:
  “I wanted the final message to be honesty matters a lot and we should care if it’s eroding and we should do what we can to push back against that erosion.” ([44:10])
• Closing call to action:
  “To the extent to which honesty is under attack, we need to do something about it, because the more it erodes, the worse things are going to become.” ([49:47])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Guest Introduction & Project Genesis — 02:13–06:54
• The Importance of Honesty: Research Findings — 07:04–08:54
• Defining and Recognizing Honesty/Dishonesty — 13:43–20:20
• The Honesty Chart: Visualizing Honest Behavior — 23:11–23:50
• Are Most People Honest? Empirical Research — 25:42–29:20
• Student Cheating, Psychology, and Honor Codes — 30:18–36:14
• Effectiveness of Institutional Strategies — 36:14–42:50
• Consequences of the Honesty Crisis & Call to Action — 44:10–47:41
• Final Takeaways and Closing Reflections — 47:49–49:47

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Conclusion & Takeaways

Dr. Miller’s Hopes for Listeners ([47:49])

• Develop a richer understanding of what honesty is.
• Recognize how honesty is under threat in everyday life and less-obvious sectors.
• Appreciate why honesty—and its erosion—matters both societally and personally.
• Take individual and collective action to protect honesty as a foundational virtue.

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For Further Exploration:
Sections and references on deep fakes (Ch.3), online infidelity (Ch.4), political fake news (Ch.6), celebrity honesty (Ch.7), and sermon plagiarism (Ch.8) are included in the book, along with a detailed bibliography and endnotes for deeper study.

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Not to Miss:
Dr. Miller’s closing message:

“I hope it’s not just an interesting issue in the abstract, but also personally relevant... because the more [honesty] erodes, the worse things are going to become.” — Dr. Christian Miller ([49:47])

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Host: Dr. Christina Gessler
Guest: Dr. Christian Miller, author of The Honesty Crisis
Podcast: New Books Network — Academic Life
Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Transcript

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

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[Dr. Christina Gessler]

the New Books Network. Hello everyone and welcome to Academic Life. This is a podcast for your academic journey and beyond. I'm the creator, producer and host of the show, Dr. Christina Yesler, and today I am pleased to be joined by Dr. Christian Miller, who is the author of the Honesty Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World. Welcome to the show, Dr. Mellor.

[Dr. Christian Miller]

It's great to be with you and I really look forward to our conversation together.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

I'm so glad that you're here and that we get to talk about this important and from reading your book little understood topic. Before we do that, will you please tell us about yourself?

[Dr. Christian Miller]

Well, I'm currently a professor of philosophy. I teach at Wake Forest University where I've been for the last 21 years. It's actually the only job I've ever had. I started as a as an assistant professor of philosophy here in 2004 and have kind of worked my way through the ranks and loved being here at Wake Forest and Winston Sale, North Carolina. I also met my wife here and we have three children now who keep me very busy outside of work time and what else to say? I teach in the philosophy so I especially teach in the areas of ethics and philosophy of religion. And I do research when I have time, especially research, no surprise here, in the area of virtue and character, with a focus these days on the topic of honesty. So that's, that's a little bit about myself, happy to say more, but that's at least an intro in the preface of the book.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

You tell us about sort of the 10 year lead up to producing this book. And we learned that you direct the Honesty Project project that came from a John Templeton foundation grant. But what led to the initial curiosity in studying honesty?

[Dr. Christian Miller]

That's a great question. So I had already been studying virtue and character more generally for a number of years. I head up a project in that regard called the Character Project, also funded by the John Templeton Foundation. We were investigating issues like what is virtue? What is it to be a good person? How good in fact are people today? How can we become better and overcome some of our character flaws? That in my own research prompted me to write some academic books and also a popular level non academic book called the Character Gap. Well, when that was all wrapping up, I said, you know, I'm not ready to leave the world of virtue and character, but I don't want to keep saying the same thing over and over again. I want to have something fresh but in the same general space. So I was looking around and saying what is not being paid enough attention to, what is being neglected by academics and society at large. And immediately honesty jumped out at me. It was something that academics weren't talking about. They had only in my field of philosophy only published two articles in 50 years, which is basically nothing and kind of shockingly neglected. And I was seeing similar trends in other fields like psychology as well as in society at large. I thought honesty was under attack, it was eroding. So I put together some team members and we approached the John Templeton foundation and we said, look, here's an opportunity to do something really new and innovative and push forward an area of research that hasn't been explored. And Templeton was convinced. They funded us for the Honesty Project, which ended up being a five year interdisciplinary project that investigated honesty specifically from the perspectives of philosophy and psychology. I wrote the philosophy side. My teammates in psychology did a lot of studies and we funded 16 academics all over the world for their new research products on honesty. We had conferences, we had a summer seminar. The upshot of it. And then I'll say how this connects to the, the book we're talking about today. The upshot of it was after Five years. I think we really moved the needle forward on work on honesty. So we ended up generating over 100 new academic research articles and several books and several hundred new presentations on honesty. So what was a very neglected topic now I think is a very lively, engaged topic in academic research. But that's academic research. And so I didn't just, like with the earlier character material, I didn't want to leave it there. I didn't want to say, okay, we did all this really cool stuff. Oh, and by the way, you have to be an academic to engage with it and, and be able to even read the articles. So I was at that point inspired to see if we could take some of the insights and bring them to a larger audience, bring them to a popular audience and see what the response would be. And then that led me to write this book called the Honesty Crisis. In a way, hopefully that doesn't presuppose, you know, having a PhD or a lot of academic jargon or a lot of barriers to entry, but hopefully is accessible and engaging and something that will, you know, my dream is, you know, ultimately help push back against these honesty crises which I see arising in our society.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

One of the things we realize early on in the book is that everybody thinks honesty is a virtue and that it's very important and almost nobody knows what it is.

[Dr. Christian Miller]

Right. I think it's a fair assessment, both points. So there's actually empirical evidence backing up the first part. We did a study here at Wake Forest where we asked people, take 60 characteristics, you know, rank order them. We're going to force you to rank or these 60 characteristics, including things like being intelligent, funny, forgiving, witty, and so forth. Honesty was on the list too. And then we're going to force you to rank order them in three respects. What do you want to know the most about someone? What do you. What's the most important when it comes to liking someone? And what is most relevant to you in terms of respecting someone? So respecting someone, liking someone and understanding someone. And guess what happened? Well, since it's something I included in the book, no surprise perhaps, but this is, I think it's. If you asked someone on the street, ordinarily, it probably wouldn't come to their, their mind. Honesty was number one in all three areas. Honesty was the most important characteristic out of 60 when it came to liking, respecting and understanding someone. Okay, so that's the kind of supports the important side of it. But now what is this thing called honesty? Yeah, I think we have a initial sense of it. Honesty is, you know has something to do with true telling. When we think of our kind of cultural paradigms of honesty, like Abraham Lincoln, or in the opposite, say, like Pinocchio or some other, you know, maybe people today, I don't know if I should name their names or not. We, we think it's all wrapped up with telling the truth or telling lies. And that, I think is a good starting point. But I think there's a lot more nuance and richness and sophistication to honesty than that. I'd be happy to dive into that if that's of interest.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

It is, and I think we will be diving into it again and again as we go along. In, in the preface, you tell us honesty matters and people care a great deal about it. Yes, we are facing an unprecedented erosion of honesty today. Deception has become easier than ever. Can we talk about how people know there's an erosion of honesty even as they have a sort of nebulous understanding of what honesty is?

[Dr. Christian Miller]

Yeah, that's, that's very good. So I think it's, you don't have to have a kind of worked out philosophical account of something to be able to recognize it. And that's a good, that's all for the better because we don't have a lot of worked out philosophical accounts of many things and yet we can recognize them. Even something as simple as being a bachelor, that's a stock philosophical example. You don't have to have a really worked out definition of what a bachelor is to be able to recognize whether someone's a bachelor or not. It's actually really, really hard to define precisely what a bachelor is. So too, I think in the case of honesty, you don't have to have all the nuances down and, you know, all your T's crossed and so forth to be able to tell whether there are honesty problems in society. So let me elaborate on what I mean by these honesty crises. I won't go into the, into detail about anyone yet, but just the kind of general phenomenon I'm talking about. So when I say there's an honesty crisis, I say two things are happening. Dishonesty is becoming more tempting and more appealing than it has been in the past in some area of society. And at the same time it's easier to get away with the dishonesty than it has been in the past. So it's a double edged sword. It's a bad combination of more tempting and easier to get away with the dishonesty. And then I focus in the book on six different case studies and Again, I won't expand on them in detail for the moment, but just to broad, broad strokes here. You know, AI student cheating. Well, I think lots of people, professors in particular like myself, can recognize this is dishonest. Even if we don't have a worked out theory what honesty is. They're using AI to write their papers for them or to do their problem sets or their coding assignments, despite the express prohibition of the professor. The other five, in real quick order, are things like deep fake audio and video, increased celebrity status and influencer culture, which is fostering more dishonesty. Politics in particular, political misinformation and fake news being disseminated on social media, Internet infidelity. So things like Ashley Madison and chat rooms which are fostering a kind of dishonesty in sexually exclusive relationships, sermon plagiarism and other issues connected to religion where it looks like there's cheating going on and dishonesty going on when it comes to preparing sermons using AI tools. And so I don't know, actually, I think I lost count there. But at least those are most of the ones I talk about. And in each case I think we can readily recognize, yeah, there's something fishy going on here, something dishonest going here, even if we don't have a really well worked out theory of what honesty is.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

Yes. Just to summarize for listeners, there's six key areas of society under threat that you identify in the book. They are politics, education, relationships, religion, celebrity, culture, and technology. We will not have time to dive into all of those chapters, but we are going to dig into as many much as we can. Right away in the book, you lead us into this question of what is honesty and how do we understand it? Chapter one is called Honesty is a lot more interesting than you might think. It's also a lot more complicated than we might think. As you've alluded to, we need to understand the nuances and we need to really think about a lot of synonyms that we use for honesty and why maybe they aren't doing the heavy lifting that we think they are. So when you take us through honesty in, in that section of the book, you talk about a lot of the words that people will use when they're, when they're talking about honesty, misleading, cheating, stealing, BSing, hypocrisy, self deception. And you say that honesty and dishonesty cover a vast amount of moral territory and yet not all of these things are the same thing as lying. And yet they all fall under the scope of honesty. What would you like to Unpack for us there.

[Dr. Christian Miller]

That's great. So you got it all exactly right. And there is a lot to unpack. So I'm going to start very broad and then go a little bit more detailed. So very broadly, I'm thinking of honesty as a virtue, a virtue of character. So it's a good making feature of your character. If you have this as part of your character, that's a good thing. The opposite device is dishonesty. That's a bad thing. As part of your character, it has a outward side to it, which is behavioral. So it leads to certain kinds of behavior and has inward side to it as well, which is motivational. So it speaks to what motivates you to do those behaviors. Let's start with the behavioral side and then we can go into the motivational, if you like. On the behavioral side. Well, what does honesty have to do with behavior? The thing we already alluded to earlier, Our mind goes there. I think right away it has to do with telling the truth. And I agree completely. And so the opposite dishonesty would be lying. However, that is one component, not the only components. And one of the reasons why it's a lot more interesting than we might have initially thought is that there are so many other facets or sides to this virtue. So, okay, honesty prevents lying, but it also prevents stealing. Well, stealing and lying, we know, are not the same thing. It prevents cheating. That's not the same thing as the other two. It prevents hypocrisy. That's also different. It prevents BSing, that's also different. And then I can just rattle off this list of these other things, like misleading fraud, promise breaking. There are a number of different actions which are not the same. They're distinct from each other, and yet they all fall under the purview, under the scope of this virtue of honesty. It prevents these kinds of behavior. So I think it is. I still believe that despite having talked about this for many years and some people push back against, I still think it is one of the broadest virtues in terms of how many behaviors it speaks to. And yet it's not just a matter of behavior. It also matters a lot. Why you're doing the action, what's motivating you, what's your heart behind the behavior. So to make it more concrete, and let's focus on truth telling for a moment. You know, I'm talking to the boss. The boss asked me a question. I give an honest response. I tell the truth to the boss. But you could. There's a further question of why I did it. And if my motivation is something like, well, I don't want to get punished or fired or I'm angling for a promotion or something very different, like I don't want to feel guilty for telling a lie or something very different. Again, I don't, I want to get rewards in the afterlife. I don't get punished in the afterlife. Those are all motivations which I think are self serving. They're egoistic, they're aimed at benefiting myself. I don't think they get to count as virtuous and part of the virtue of honesty. And so you have to have the right kind of motivation behind the behavior as well as the behavior to get to count in or you know, get a check mark next to the honesty box, well, to end this, what would count as appropriate motivation? So I've said the self serving, the egoistic motivation is off the table. If when I'm talking to the boss I had different kinds of motivation, they're going to be okay. What if my motivation was because it's the right thing to do to tell the truth, or because I have a moral obligation or requirement to tell the truth or because I've been commanded to tell the truth? Those are fine. I have no problem with that. They're what we might call dutiful or more abstract impersonal motivation to do the right thing. Or if my motivation had been more selfless, like because I care about my boss or because I respect my boss, or because that's my friend, or because I don't want to do the wrong thing to this person, these kinds of concern for what's good for another person, it's called altruistic, more selfless motivation. I think that's fine too. So to sum it up, when we turn to the internal side of things, and this again is all under the theme of it's a rich virtue, it's multifaceted, it's more complex than you might have thought. When we turn to the internal side self interested motivation, I'm going to put that off the table. But if it's more because it's the right thing or it's more because I care about this person or doing what's right by that, this particular person, that is just fine in my book. So now we get a more multifaceted picture of honesty.

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[Dr. Christina Gessler]

section of the book there's an example of someone finding a wallet and it has some money in it and they they return it. And you take us through many of these reasons why somebody might return it. And they include everything from guilt if they kept it, to worrying about the well being of the person if they don't get their money back to as you've gone through religious beliefs, beliefs in how that will affect them in the afterlife. Just a lot of criteria that informs how people have their own relationship with their honesty. It's interesting to read that section of the book and think about sort of the internal checklist people have of why they would follow through on the motivation to return it. That it's not as simple as this belongs to somebody else and they had it for their own well being. Of course I have to return it. It's all of these things that you've been sharing with us just now.

[Dr. Christian Miller]

Yeah, that's very good. So in this example you find a lost wallet. We don't have to get into the details of the example, but just maybe related to listeners, to your own experience. If you've ever found a lost wallet and then subsequently you looked inside, you found maybe address or something, you returned the wallets. From the outside that looks like an honest behavior. And I would agree you return the wall to its owner, you could have instead pocketed the money or taken the whole thing and never, no one would ever have known and you would have been richer because of it. So from the outside that looks like an honest action of returning it. There's still though this further question if we're talking about the virtue of what motivated you and unless that gets a check mark too, it's not going to count as virtuously honest. And so that's why same story is going to apply here too if it's egoistic motivation, because now we have to adapt it to this example. Maybe I want to get written up in the newspaper. Maybe I wanted to get some kind of reward for returning it. Maybe a heavenly reward or reward from the owner. All these kinds of things, they're not going to count. But I was okay with the example you gave of because it's the right thing to do. Because if the owner lost it and the owner, the owner's property and the owner deserves to have it back, that's fine with me. That's not egoistic. That's not trying to benefit myself. You know, another reason could be because I care about this person. I actually know this person. They're my friend. I want them to have their wallet back. So, yeah, that's. That's the picture that's emerging. I will make now further amendments that we haven't. Well, maybe, maybe two further amendments we haven't elaborated on yet. One is that I don't think it has to always be pure motivation. So you could have mixed motives. You could have more than one. Like, you know, you return the wallet both because you care about this person's property being restored to them and because you want to get some kind of reward in the afterlife. So long as that second one is very much the second one, very much supplemental, it's not the main motive. I'm not going to be too picky about that, too fussy about that. So it doesn't always have to be pure. And the other thing that makes it a little bit more nuanced here is motivation is complicated and we might not always know what our own motivation is. So we might return that while thinking we have good motives. And yet deeper down, subconsciously or unbeknownst to us, we might really be doing it for some kind of impression management reason, getting it, you know, making a good impression on others. That's. That's a hard problem. No one's been able to solve that problem. But it is still an objective question whether you did it for the right reason or not, even if you don't realize what your reason was in the moment.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

And in chapter one, there's a section called what is honesty? I have an early proof version, so for me it's page five and there's a chart and an honesty chart. And it is a diagram that helps you understand how honesty works and figuring out if you're actually being honest. So it has five different components. Truthfulness, forthrightness, being respectful of property, proper compliance with rules. And then the final box is integrity and authenticity. And so you have all these Arrows. And if they all lead up to honesty, then. Then that is honesty.

[Dr. Christian Miller]

Very good. Yes. So that was just kind of giving a visual of how honesty pertains to so many different areas of our moral life. I had put it earlier in our discussion negatively. So honesty prevents lying, but if we want to put that positively, it's connected to truthfulness. I put it negatively earlier. Honesty prevents stealing, but if we want to put that positively, it's being respectful of property. I put it negatively in terms of. Prevents cheating, put it positively, proper compliance with rules and so forth for the other ones. So this is a visual I'm trying to give the different areas of the moral life and what it looks like to be doing well there. You're telling the truth. You're not taking other people's property. You're not breaking the rules of the. Of the activity that you're involved in. And they're all ultimately linked to the overarching concept, the umbrella term, the master virtue, whatever label you want to use. I don't know if I like that one. But you know the main virtue we're talking about today, which is the virtue of honesty.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

And you see at the end of chapter one, we are talking about what it is to be an honest person, a person whose character has the virtue of honesty. And in that chapter you say along the way, we have seen there are many ways to fall short of honesty. And throughout the book, you take us through a lot of ways we can fall short of honesty. What is more broadly called this honesty crisis. In chapter two, you say, the news is not all bad. And one of the questions you ask there is, are most people liars? And then you get us into the truth default theory. So could we briefly touch on are most people liars? And what is the truth default theory?

[Dr. Christian Miller]

Sure, absolutely. So what we've been doing so far is conceptual just trying to get clear on what we're even talking about. As a philosopher, that's where I want to start. I want to make sure we're all on the same page as to what honesty is. None of that speaks to whether people are actually honest. For all we've said, it could turn out that there's not one single honest person in the world today. That's an empirical question that has to be decided based upon the facts on the ground. And so as I move on, I move away from the conceptual into the empirical, and I raise this question, at least with respect to lying. Should we think most people are dishonest? Are most people lying kind of all the time? Should we just assume people are liars? Are we liars ourselves? And so we can ask that of ourselves and come up with an answer, although maybe we'll lie to ourselves. So it's hard to say. But there's actual empirical research documenting the frequency with which people tend to tell lies. Some of the earlier research was a bit misleading. It was found that on average groups of people would tell about two to three lies a day. More recent research is more carefully done and more nuanced. And what it does is it actually tracks individual people and, and says, you know, this person, how many lies did they tell this person, how many lies they tell? And in, in the study I highlight the most. A thousand people were surveyed and 60% said that they did not tell a lie at all in the last 24 hours. Of the remaining 40%, most of them told very few lies and it was only a 5% group which told a lot of lies. And then given the way averages work, because they told so many lies, they inflated the average. And so overall it looked like two to three lies as a group. But the upshot of it is actually, I think, pretty encouraging, which is that most people don't lie most of the time. Now you have to be careful about this 5% group and you want to make sure you can pick them out and probably not be friends with them or be on your guard with them. But this now leads to truth default theory, the standard model. I think today, the leading model today says this. Most people default into a truth telling mindset. Most people are naturally inclined to tell the truth most of the time. It didn't have to be that way. You know, evolution or whatever else could have gone a different way and given us a different, or society could have engineered us a different way. But as a matter of fact, it seems like this is how it works. So it, you know, so say it one more time. And then there's a corollary to this. Most people naturally want to tell the truth and lying takes more effort and it's more costly psychologically for us to do. And then the corollary to this is truth bias theory, which is that we tend to be biased in what we expect others to tell us. To us, we expect others will tell us the truth. Maybe it's very abstract. So just a quick example to end. You know, when you're in a unfamiliar area of town or in another city and you ask people directions, you're defaulting into thinking that they're going to tell you the truth. You assume that, and if someone asks you directions, your natural tendency is to tell them the truth in return. So this, I think, is overall a pretty positive, encouraging side to our psychology. Although the book doesn't end there, alas. Maybe it'll be good if it did. But alas, there's some less encouraging stuff still to come.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

So to dig into a little bit of less encouraging stuff, chapter five is called AI Academic Cheating and the Honesty Crisis in Education. And that chapter, you let us know we're not going to get to the end of it and know how to solve the AI honesty crisis. However, we are going to understand more of the psychology of student cheating. We're going to understand what encouraged student cheating in what you call the good old days, and that a number of those things hold true now in why people cheat. And you also take us through a better understanding of how students can fall into cheating in the first place. So you identify three kinds of cheaters we might encounter in our classroom. We have the ignorant cheater, the self interested cheater, and the marginal cheater. Can we get an understanding of sort of the student mindset and how they might fall into these cheating categories, which are kind of a cheating trap? It doesn't sound like most students show up in class thinking, I'm going to cheat my way through this.

[Dr. Christian Miller]

Right, right. Very good. So there's a lot of ground to cover here. I'll just start with a bit on a psychology. So we've known for a long time, of course, that in the student context, students are sometimes willing to cheat. That's nothing new. There's no honesty crisis. Just saying that there have been developments more recently that have facilitated an honesty crisis, but just sticking with normal student psychology here, there's good empirical evidence to suggest that a number of factors are at play. One is that students are willing to cheat if they think they can get away with it and not get caught. And by the way, of course that's going to benefit them. That's going to help them somehow in the class or academically. So that makes sense, although it's kind of depressing. So say it again. We know that students are motivated in certain circumstances to cheat if they think they can get away with it and it's going to benefit them at the same time. We also know that students care to some extent about doing the right thing, about not being a cheater, about being honest. And they care about it in such a way that they want others to think of themselves as honest and they want to be able to think of themselves as honest people. They value a Self conception of themselves as honest. To let this play out a little bit more concretely and make it a little bit more tangible and relatable. Let me give you one of my favorite studies in this area. So this was a study done by a team, one of whom was Lisa Hsu. And she had student participants come into the lab, take a test with 20 problems. They would be paid 50 cents per correct answer. They took the test, they turned in their materials. They were graded by the people in charge and paid accordingly. And this version I'm thinking of, they got seven out of 20 correct. And so they got paid the appropriate amount of money. That's not so interesting, but it gives us our baseline. The next version is different. Students come into the lab, they are given the same test, 50 cents per correct answer. They had to do the test. But now the twist becomes they get to grade it themselves. They get to destroy their materials and just verbally report how they did. So they can say anything they want. They can say, you know, I did terribly. They could say what they actually did, and they could inflate it and say, that did wonderfully well. As a matter of fact, in this same study, 14 out of 20 was reported as the average. So 7 in the baseline. 14 out of 20 in this, we might call shredder condition, where they got to shred their materials. One thing that's interesting about this is that the students were seemingly willing to cheat. So that plays into the idea of being willing to cheat. If you think you can get away with it, not get caught, it's beneficial to you. So 7. I don't think they really got 14, but they said they did. Another thing that's interesting about it, though, is that they didn't go all the way. They didn't say they got 20 out of 20. Almost no one did. Even though it was an average, almost no one said they got 20. And so they were being restrained to some extent by things like their desire to still think of themselves as honest people. And then this gets played out in further studies, and I'll stop at this point gets played on further studies when we look at things like the honor code and moral reminders, which help bring to conscious awareness a student's values and how they do care about honesty. And they don't want to think of themselves as a cheater because in further iterations of this, of this kind of study, when they first sign the honor code of their school, you know, I commit myself to not lie, cheater, steal, or whatever the wording was, then they take this, the, the, the test, 20 cent, 20 problems, 50 cents per correct answer. Then they grade themselves. They shred their materials, verbally report how they did. The average drops back to roughly the baseline. Cheating seems to disappear. So it's a fascinating study of a mixed character. On the one hand, not so great that they're willing to cheat. On the other hand, interesting to observe that they're not willing to typically to go all the way that they could. And when they're reminded of their values, the honor code and other things bring back to their conscious awareness what's right and wrong. Cheating tends to disappear. So this is a kind of background framework, I think, of student cheating that is insightful and kind of prepares us to think about challenges that came along with new technologies. But that's where I start.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

And listeners can find more about Li Shu's findings in this chapter. And there are two charts about the effect of honor code and not an honor code in my copy there on page 101. Professor Hsu works at the London Business School, and it's her study that's being cited here. There are also endnotes and a bibliography for listeners who want to dig deeper into any of the sources that you are citing as we go along. It was interesting to see the effect of the honor code. And what was more interesting was to see the effect on students who have an understanding about what the cheating guidelines are at their school, meaning the, the guidelines for avoiding it. You, you talk in this about students having lack of clarity about things like plagiarism, and about an understanding of how the honor code actually affects them. There was an example of what I would call passive learning. They just had to sign something. Others had to, you know, go through a particular ceremony at their school, or they had to, they had to say it out loud. And there was more, it seems, effect on students who actually felt the honor code had something to do with them rather than yet another form that you just check off.

[Dr. Christian Miller]

That's very good. So, you know, here I was thinking about what strategies have been developed to try rein in student cheating before we get to the age of online and before we get, especially today to the age of AI. And there have been a number of strategies over the last 50 years, I think look like they're very promising and are helpful and are efficacious. And I'm backed up by empirical research showing that they're efficacious in reining in student cheating. You're never going to eliminate student cheating, but the question is, can we rein it in and the two that you've highlighted here are one, just making sure there's clarity so that everyone's on the same page. Because what often happens is that a professor will say, you know, they'll think they've been clear. You know, you're allowed to do this, but you're not allowed to do this, but they have made clear and the students take it in a different direction. And then afterwards, when the students called out or punished or something like that, say, well, I didn't know, you know, I didn't. I thought that was allowed. You know, why are you punishing me for this? And so making sure everyone's on the same page about what the standards are. Now, the other side of this, which we've mentioned in more detail, is this honor code. You're quite right. I mean, some schools, the honor code is just window dressing. They have it because it looks good. It's a kind of PR thing. It helps maybe with recruiting, helps make parents feel better about sending their kids to the school. That's not going to be very efficacious. And in, you know, a step up would be okay at the school. The students do have to sign it, but if it just becomes like a road thing that they do as a formality, that's not going to be very efficacious either. What, what has been efficacious and what we, I think we want to see if we like this idea is buy in by all participants. Of course, student buy in from the very beginning. Like during the first week of freshman orientation. You know, some schools do a ceremony and each student comes up in front of the entire class and publicly signs their name to a book or they write it on a wall or something like that, and then it's reinforced over and over again. Even some schools have the students play a role in writing the honor code or reaffirming it or rewriting it. That's great. And then, but, you know, the professors have to be on board, too, and the administration has to be on board too. It's no good if the professors don't care about it and they, they, they kind of blow it off or never bring it up in class. So in my case, I try to make this very tangible for the students. When they take an exam, we verbally recite it together, our honor code here at Wake Forest. So they cite out loud, and I do too, in front of them jointly, because thereby demonstrating that we are all pledging our honor and signing up for this honor code. And then for written exam papers, I make them handwrite the honor code and sign their name as a kind of pledge to that kind of bonding themselves to what they're signing here. So that's what I. Yeah, I think I commend. If you want to do it, do it right. And if you do it right, there is, at least in the old days, there was good evidence that it would make a difference.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

One of the things you point out in this section is that if a student feels that the professor cares about them, they're less likely to cheat. And if they feel that a professor is really interested in the material, they're less likely to cheat. There's something about a mastery mindset, this sense that you came to class to get better at something. The professor cares that you get better at it, and the professor is excited about why you were all there. That has a positive momentum, and it has that momentum away from cheating and towards honesty. Can you talk about mastery mindset?

[Dr. Christian Miller]

So there are multiple things there that you just mentioned. I think they're all important. So I want to. Again, this is all under the heading of things that are efficacious. Things that I think we've found in the past are helpful here. What we want to get away from is a kind of performance mindset where it's just a matter of I need to. I'm only here to check certain boxes, to complete certain assignments, to get a grade, and then I move on. And I'm just, you know, ultimately getting a degree, and then that's just stepping stone to a job, and I'm just using this class as a stepping stone to the next thing. Rather, what we want is. I mean, at least as a professor. Maybe I'm biased here, but I want the students to develop a love for the material and care about the material and become invested in mastering the material for its own sake. Because it's important to know, because it matters, because it's worthwhile to spend our time engaging with, and then to help facilitate that. It's going to be hard for me to inspire students to do that if I come across as bored or going through the motions or checked out. You know, I'm only here to do research, and I've got to do my teaching duties just because I fire. But I. All I really care about is research. All that stuff is just going to turn students off and incentivize them to do the bare minimum. And, you know, if cheating helps them get through the class, so much the better. Another wrinkle to all that is not only do I. It's important for me to show a love for the material and think that, you know, demonstrate that I care about it. And I think it's really important. It's also important for me to care about the students and be. And not just kind of have a nameless, faceless relationship with them. But to the extent it's allowed by the size of the class, I fully recognize that some schools and some classes is not going to be possible if there are three or four hundred students there. But to the extent of which it's allowed in a class of 40 or under, get to know them by name, get to, you know, talk to them outside of class during office hours, be very available over email or for one on one meetings. And so to demonstrate that I care about them and they're learning and it's important to me that they learn this material and that they come to respect me and care about me as the professor. And if all those things happen, and I know that it's easier said than done, then the nice consequence or nice outcome of that will be it's going to be a lot harder for them to cheat in my classes. If they care about the material, they care about me. If I show them that I care about them and that I care about the material, it's going to SAP some motivation. Not going to, of course, eliminate it. Some people still do it, but it's going to be a disincentive to cheating in my classes.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

The book takes us through the six areas of society under threat with this honesty crisis. We've talked about several of them. As we've mentioned, there are more than we've had time to get to, so I want to sign posts for listeners. Chapter three covers the honesty crisis surrounding deep fakes. Chapter four is called Online Infidelity and the Honesty Crisis in Relationships. Chapter six is Fake News and the Honesty Crisis in Politics. Chapter seven is Fame, Lying and the Honesty Crisis for Celebrities. Chapter eight is Pastors and the Honesty Crisis in Religion. Chapter nine is called if Honesty is Under Attack, why Bother to Protect It? One of the things that you tell us throughout the book is that we are not powerless, that we can look to individual and institutional strategies and that you want us to more readily spot the honesty crisis in our society today and you call for a collective effort in the time we have left. I want to take a few moments to look at chapter nine. You have some thoughts you offer there about how increasing dishonesty is a dangerous path for us to go down and you want to make a case for why honesty is better for us. What would you like to unpack there, Dr. Muller?

[Dr. Christian Miller]

Thank you so much. So after having gone through these honesty crises, I didn't want to just end the book. I mean, first of all that'd be kind of depressing. But secondly, I really wanted to block a reaction, potential reaction, which is, yeah, honesty is eroding, yes, under it's in crisis. So what, why, you know, why should I care? I wanted the final message to be honesty matters a lot and we should care if it's eroding and we should do what we can to push back against that erosion. So I wanted it to be, as you said, a kind of galvanizing, a kind of call to action and kind of motivating us to do something about this. So the place maybe I'd like to start is by recognizing how or kind of reaffirming how important it really is and what happens when it goes missing. I kind of get into that through a couple different lenses, like what does religion have to say about this? What happens if it's missing in our individual lives? But let's start at the societal level. So let's think about what a society would look like if it's honest and if what a society would look like if it's dishonest. It's sometimes easier to start with a negative when it's absent. So if we, if we live in a society of dishonesty, I think we should be very troubled by that and not be satisfied with a society like that. Why? For a couple reasons. One, it's going to be really hard to trust other people. If I know that people in my society are dishonest, that's going to include their dishonest towards me. How am I supposed to trust anyone anymore? And when I go to the store, when I go to the school, when I deal with government or financial institutions, dishonesty undermines trust. And trust is so valuable. Another thing that's going to be eroded is relationships. So if relationships are no longer based on honesty anymore, then they're just instrumentalized. I am only interacting with others because what can I get from them? How could I take advantage of them? How could I cheat or steal from them to benefit myself or lie or mislead them? So we just use other people for our own self interested gains. And I sure as heck don't want to live in a society like that where relationships are just based on using other people for our own purposes. And then the last thing I'll say at the societal level is look, if you have rampant dishonesty that's going to foster fear. How can I sleep at night knowing that people around me are prone to cheat or steal from me? People I thought were my friends are going to be inclined to lie or mislead me. That's living in a society that fosters fear is no fun at all. And the last thing I want to do is the kind of society I want. So honesty will prevent those things. Honesty will foster trust with others. It will foster genuine relationships of care and depth and sincerity and respect. And it will push back against fear towards others. Now I think I'll stop and we can go wherever direction you want from here. But I don't think that's the end of the story. I think there has to be more said about why I personally should care about honesty. And even if my society is honest, it doesn't automatically follow that I should be. But at least the starting point, I think, is we should really be bothered if our society is no longer honest anymore.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

We're coming to the close of our time together. So I want to ask you, what do you hope listeners will take away?

[Dr. Christian Miller]

Multiple things, maybe probably too much, but I have lots of hopes. One hope is that we'll have developed a better understanding of what we're talking about, what honesty is, how it's a lot richer and more nuanced than we might have thought initially. Another thing that I hope listeners will take away is an appreciation of how it's under attack in various areas of society today, especially ones which we might not have noticed. Some of these, I think, are becoming more and more common currency. It's becoming widely known now, for example, the education context, that AI is troublesome for student honesty. More and more articles are being written about that every day. Some other ones are less well known and less appreciated. And so hopefully I've brought them to greater attention and brought greater awareness to them. Things like deep fakes, audio and visual. Also things like sermon plagiarism in the religious context. I don't think a lot of people are paying very much attention to that yet, and I hope they, they will more so. And then the last thing which we've just touched on briefly is a greater appreciation for why this matters. This is not just an academic game we're playing. I'm not interested in scoring academic points or, you know, proving that I'm right or anything about that in the, in this, in this kind of space. I think this is really important at so many personal levels. It's important for our society. It's important for me as a person it's important how I react, interact with my friends and raise my children and have a family and all this kind of thing. These issues matter. And to the extent to which honesty is under attack, we need to do something about it, because the more it erodes, the worse things are going to become. So I hope it's not just an interesting issue in the abstract, but also personally relevant to people and something that'll be motivated to do something about.

[Dr. Christina Gessler]

Thank you so much for being here today, Dr. Miller, and sharing the honesty, preserving our most treasured virtue in an increasingly Dishonest World. I'm Dr. Christina Gessler. You're listening to the Academic Life. Please join us again.