Out of character.

Surprising truths about the liar, cheat, sinner (and saint) lurking in all of us.

David DeSteno & Piercarlo Valdesolo.

1 / SAINTS AND SINNERS.

The mental battle that defines our character.

Marshall Clement Sanford was an Eagle Scout-literally. The son of a respected Florida family, in his younger years he was a proud member of Boy Scout Troop 509 from Pompano Beach. But these early years weren't all campfires and fishing trips-becoming an Eagle Scout was hard work, both physically and mentally. Besides learning how to tie knots that would hold your weight, mastering the exacting science of log cabin construction, and figuring out which way was north based on the position of the sun, being an Eagle Scout also const.i.tuted, as Marshall would later say, an important and arduous developmental voyage-a voyage "of character, leadership, and persistence."1 For him, it was a voyage that appeared to pay off. Marshall did well for himself. After high school, he graduated from Furman College at the top of his cla.s.s. He went on to complete an MBA at the University of Virginia's prestigious Darden School of Business and a summer internship at Goldman Sachs. Marshall was rising fast, widely admired for his skills, for his smarts, and for being a straight shooter. That summer of his Goldman internship was also the summer he met Jenny Sullivan at a party in the Hamptons, and when he returned to New York City that fall to take a high-profile job, he promptly asked her to marry him. Although they both had promising careers in the big city-Jenny was a vice president of a large investment firm-they soon decided to move back to South Carolina (where Marshall's family had moved his senior year of high school), where they could live a more traditional life.

Once settled back down South, Marshall headed up a real estate company and Jenny raised their four boys in what everyone agreed was the picture of family harmony. Although her husband could be quirky and often a bit stoic, she admired him for his honesty and integrity. As Jenny would later say, "He cherished Galatians 5:22: 'The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control,' " and he lived accordingly.2 But Marshall was also ambitious and pa.s.sionate about serving his community. So the beloved native son, the very embodiment of strong moral character and good old-fashioned American values, decided it was time to run for public office.

Okay, we know what you're thinking: good character and politics aren't usually two things that go together. But Marshall was not your average politician. He wasn't in it for the prestige, the perks, or the power. He liked to describe himself as a "citizen legislator" who was in it to do the right thing by South Carolinians-to be a champion of the people. A political neophyte with a fresh face and a boatload of enthusiasm, his straightforward and earnest demeanor catapulted him to victory in his first run for Congress in 1994, where he served three terms. Those terms weren't tarnished by scandal or ego or disgrace, as they are for so many in his line of work; instead, he was widely seen as a staunch advocate and strong voice on issues of both social and fiscal responsibility. But he didn't just vote his values, he lived them. He not only fought wasteful spending during the day but was just as judicious with his own money-and the taxpayers'-at night. With little interest in the material excesses or extracurricular dalliances of the Washington, D.C., party scene, he spent his nights in the capital on the futon in his office, accommodations he preferred to renting an apartment on the government's dime. Conservative both in lifestyle and in politics, his straight-arrow persona made him a conservative favorite back home in the red state of South Carolina, and as a result, by 2003 he, Jenny, and the boys found themselves moving into the governor's mansion.

It was a welcome change for the family, as living apart had been difficult, with the frequent separations limiting the couple's time for deep conversation and sharing the ups and downs of daily life. But now everything was again falling into place. "Though we were both incredibly busy, we'd been living under the same roof at last, and with that proximity," Jenny said, "I'd fallen in love with him all over again."3 And so, it seems, had his const.i.tuents. From the very outset of his term, Marshall was trumpeted both in his home state and in Washington as a new kind of politician-a man of virtue. Even if you didn't agree with his policies, there seemed to be no question that he was a good man.

Yet on June 24, 2009, Marshall "Mark" Sanford's life changed forever. Upon arriving back in the United States from a trip to Buenos Aires, he was met by a reporter who, like many South Carolinians, had spent the past week wondering about Sanford's whereabouts. The governor had gone AWOL, offering his staff, his family, and his const.i.tuents only the flimsy lie that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail. But as we now know, he was actually in Argentina with his mistress-or his "soul mate," as he would later call her. It turned out that the seemingly levelheaded and loyal governor had been penning erotic love letters to Maria Belen Chapur for months. Evidently he had just returned to the States with more material about which to write.

Mired in a tug-of-war between his firmly held convictions about what was "right" and his desire for the woman he now claimed was his once-in-a-lifetime love, Sanford, in a tear-filled press conference later that day, begged forgiveness for his moral transgression, admitting that he had crossed the "s.e.x line" and apologizing for the pain he had caused. But it was too late. On that day Mark Sanford's image suddenly changed forever. He was no longer a paragon of virtue, and his political ambitions, along with his character, were consigned to the junk heap.

The good and bad in all of us.

Cases such as Sanford's-and the many others like it that regularly grace the headlines-fascinate us. The idea that a person seemingly living a life of propriety could commit such shameful acts, along with the suggestion that we could be so easily fooled by the pretense of goodness, shatters our confidence in our ability to judge others-or even ourselves-accurately. Whether the transgressor is a politician touting family values while carrying on an affair with an international mistress, the next-door neighbor who "seemed just like everybody else" until he committed an act of terrorism as a member of a radicalized political group, or the admired and upstanding hedge fund manager who turned out to be the perpetrator of a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, when people act in a way that violates our expectations and beliefs about their character, we-both as individuals and as a society-are often shaken to our very core. To compensate for our errors in judgment, we convince ourselves these people must have been wolves in sheep's clothing-inherently nasty individuals who may have managed to hide in plain sight for a time, but whose true colors have ultimately been revealed. Hindsight, after all, is 20/20. We tell ourselves that Sanford's fall from grace must have been long in the coming. He must have had some flaw in his character that lurked there those many years, hidden behind that Eagle Scout badge, something that Jenny (and the rest of us) just couldn't see. If we had just looked closely enough, maybe there would have been clues, windows that would have let us discern who Sanford really was as opposed to who he presented himself to be. How else could a man who once seemed such an exemplar of good character have turned out to be a lying, cheating philanderer? How else could we all have been duped?

These are good questions. But the answer, we'll argue, is not that we missed some telltale signs or that we are gullible fools. No, it's not that we misjudged his character; it's that our understanding of the concept of "character"-what it actually is and how it works-is fundamentally wrong.

Character-what Webster's defines as "the complex of mental and ethical traits often individualizing a person"-has long been almost universally agreed to be a stable fixture. People believe that it is formed at an early age through learning and experience, and that it becomes internalized and solidified into a deep-seated disposition that guides their actions over the course of their lives. In fact, the word character itself comes from an ancient Greek term referring to the marks impressed indelibly upon coins to tell them apart. And since that time, the term has been used to describe the supposed indelible marks pressed upon humans' minds and souls that "reveal" their true nature. Character is the currency we employ to make judgments about people-to determine who is good and who is flawed, who is worthy and who is not, who is saved and who is d.a.m.ned. Character, quite simply, is who we are, like it or not. Everyone believes this to be a fact; even The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Ethics says that character traits are fixed, deeply ingrained features of personality.

But if this view is correct, some things just don't add up. If character is stable, how could Mark Sanford and others like him fool so many people for so long? How could they have concealed their moral shortcomings from their families, friends, colleagues, and communities year after year? It's hard to imagine that most people are capable of such an elaborate ruse. As Tom Davis, one of Sanford's closest friends for thirty years, put it: "I've known Mark, and the opinion I've formed of him, I never would have expected something like this. This is not in character for Mark Sanford."4 Virginia Lane, one of Jenny's close friends, echoed the view: "Mark's the last person on the planet we thought this would happen to."5 And Jenny herself was the most shocked of all: "I always believed that Mark and I had no secrets. After all of these years in the public eye, our lives were open books to one another, let alone the public."6 "It never occurred to me that he would do something like that," she said upon reflection. "The person I married was centered on a core of morals."7 But in a way, our responses to situations like these aren't entirely logical or fair. Should a single moral failing erase a lifetime of good behavior? Why does a single transgression seem to give us license to brand someone with the indelible mark of a marred character? One explanation is that because these single events are so shocking and so memorable (not to mention so beaten to death by the media), they eclipse all else. But if you buy that view, then why isn't the reverse true? Why doesn't a single good deed, even a memorable one, ever seem to be seen as a mark capable of defining a person's true colors? Ever heard of Farron Hall, the homeless alcoholic who lived under a bridge in Winnipeg, and who in May 2009 risked his own life by jumping into the Red River in a heroic attempt to save a drowning teen? Probably not. That's because despite risking his life to save a total stranger, he was never hailed as a role model, never awarded a medal of honor or invited on the talk show circuit to discuss his moral bona fides. Instead, he was patted on the back by local officials and quickly forgotten. In society's eyes, this one good act wasn't nearly enough to redeem Hall from a lifetime of "degenerate behavior."

It seems that wolves may masquerade as sheep, but sheep just don't masquerade as wolves. We rarely view one good act as proof someone had good character all along, yet most of us are ready and willing to do the reverse. Those marked as "bad" can do something nice now and again and our opinion of them doesn't change, but all it takes for a person of seeming high virtue is one slip for us to claim that his or her character is inherently flawed.

This double standard may not be fair, but it's also not particularly surprising. As work by the psychologist Paul Rozin has shown, humans possess a fundamental tendency to accentuate the negative.8 Drop a fly into a bowl of delicious soup and the soup suddenly becomes inedible. Yet placing a drop of delicious soup in a bowl of dead flies hardly makes for a tasty treat. This may be an extreme example, but the point is that, rational or not, for the mind any sign of contamination-physical or moral-is hard to ignore. History has borne this tendency out over and over. In one particularly egregious example, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was accepted in many southern states that a single drop of "black blood" in one's ancestry rendered one legally black, therefore tainting and making one ineligible for all the civil rights that applied at the time, whereas the reverse didn't apply. In short, the things we deem "bad" consistently seem to hold more weight than those we deem "good."

This very fact provides a bit of a problem for the commonly held view of character as a stable phenomenon. Think of it this way: if you believe that character is fixed, you have to accept that an instance of behaving "out of character" is one of two things: (1) an aberrant event (like Hall's heroic act) or (2) a window into the person's "true" and yet hidden nature (like Sanford's indiscretion). But in reality, which one we choose seems to depend on whether the person in question was a "saint" or "sinner" to begin with.

An even bigger problem for the fixed view of character is that acting "out of character" isn't a freak occurrence or something restricted to the famous few. As we'll see throughout this book, it's actually much more commonplace than most people think. There lurks in every one of us the potential to lie, cheat, steal, and sin, no matter how good a person we believe ourselves to be. Combine these two problems, and the view of character as a stable fixture begins to crumble.

This is not to say that character doesn't exist or that our behavior is completely unpredictable. A random system like that wouldn't make any sense either. If the mind worked that way, our social world would be chaos-our actions at any moment in time would be reduced to a simple roll of the dice. No, character exists. It just doesn't work the way most people think. In the chapters that follow, we'll show you that hypocrisy and morality, love and l.u.s.t, cruelty and compa.s.sion, honesty and deceit, modesty and hubris, bigotry and tolerance-in short, vice and virtue-can coexist in each of us, and that the behavior or decision that emerges in any given moment or situation isn't necessarily the one we intend. Yet the decisions we make and the actions we take aren't haphazard; they're the product of dueling forces in our minds. As with most duels, however, there are a set of rules that guide the moves of the combatants. But to fully understand these rules, and to learn what you can do to guide the outcome of the battle, you first have to be willing to give up everything you thought you knew about character-what it is, how it is formed, and how it works.

A new look for an old problem.

When most people think of the dueling forces that shape who we are, they picture that familiar image (often in cartoon form) of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. You know, that image of two little yous-one dressed in a long white robe and a halo and the other in a body-hugging red number with horns and a pitchfork-sitting on your shoulders and whispering intently into your ears. These two little guys (or girls) have long been used to represent conflicting forces-one urging good and the other bad-that occupy our subconscious and try to influence our every decision.

Devil: "Eat all the cookies, then blame it on your brother."

Angel: "No, don't eat all the cookies, and make sure you thank Grandma for baking them."

Our character, then, is thought to have much to do with which one of these voices we tend to favor over the other-as a general rule, are we likely to eat all the cookies or thank Grandma? What's more, the voice we favor is a.s.sumed to be determined at a young age, influenced by (deliberately or not) our parents, teachers, peers, and the like. So by the time the dilemmas we face get a little more complicated-from cookie jars to dalliances with mistresses and the whole host of other moral lapses that get adults into trouble-it was believed the battle between the little shoulder sitters had pretty much reached detente; the voice we were going to listen to had already become a foregone conclusion. "Character," as Plutarch noted centuries ago, "is a habit long continued."

Now, we're simplifying a bit, as there are ongoing debates about the roles of temperament, culture, religion, upbringing, and other social and environmental factors in shaping character. But wherever you come out on these issues, most theories reach the same conclusion: good character is developed by deciding, early in life, to favor the "good" voice over the "bad" one, or in other words, by consciously deciding to tamp down those craven impulses that want all the cookies, the money, or the s.e.x-and want them now. Only by exerting willpower, it was believed, could one cultivate a n.o.ble spirit capable of ignoring sinful temptations and evil urgings. And that once that virtuous voice won out, it would become etched in your psyche and your character would be set forever.

This view seems logical. It feels right. It fits with all our other preconceived notions about ourselves. There's just one problem: it isn't borne out by the data. And it doesn't explain why humans are p.r.o.ne to behaving "out of character" as frequently and seemingly unpredictably as they do, sometimes in ways that surprise even themselves. Simply put, the view is fundamentally incorrect.

In the chapters that follow, we'll explain, using a wealth of rigorous psychological research, exactly why this long-held theory is flawed, and in so doing, we'll argue for a new, more enlightened view of character that takes into account how people actually act. We'll show why the mind values flexibility and why, whether we like it or not, exerting willpower doesn't inherently make us an angel, any more than indulging our urges necessarily makes us a devil. Life isn't that simple. Navigating the social world successfully involves being able to adapt our behavior to the challenges and opportunities that individual situations present. A character that is fixed or etched-and by that we mean a mind that consistently and automatically forces us to listen to one "voice" over the other-couldn't possibly steer us through the complex world of human social relations. After all, one of the greatest evolutionary advantages humans have is cognitive flexibility, the ability to fine-tune our thoughts, att.i.tudes, and behaviors in the face of changing contexts and situations. Just as we are wired to recognize when something that may usually be bad for us (say, drinking a foul-tasting substance) can be, in a specific instance, good (drinking foul-tasting medication), so too can we recognize when a social act that is generally advantageous (for example, being generous or telling the truth), can in certain cases lead to problems (as, for example, when our generosity causes us to be taken advantage of, or when the truth unnecessarily hurts someone's feelings). When we seem to act out of character, then, it's not because we've just had a mental hiccup or we let our guard down; it's because in that moment or situation, our actions, at least to some part of our minds, seemed optimal. The problem, though, is that seeming optimal and being optimal can be quite different things.

So how are we to understand the malleability of character? The best way is to envision character as a fluctuating state, not a permanent trait. It's not a static attribute like blue eyes or broad shoulders; it's a state that is always shifting, trying to find the right balance between competing psychological mechanisms. Picture a scale, the old-school kind with golden plates on each side. At any point in time, the scale can be balanced in infinite ways, from a level position with equal weight on both sides to heavily tipped with many more weights on one side than the other. Character is much like that scale-how a person acts at any moment is determined by how the scale is tipping, or where along the continuum it's balanced at that exact moment. Character unfolds over time, but not in a slow or linear way. The scale can shift, and shift quickly, in either direction. In fact, it's constantly oscillating to adjust to our needs, situations, and priorities. And the direction in which it shifts in any given moment is determined by the outcome of the struggle between dueling mechanisms in our mind.

Now, you might be wondering whether this metaphor isn't just like the angel-vs.-devil one, except that it's a little more fluid. Isn't it essentially saying that we're continually choosing between dueling voices in our head, one telling us to be good and the other bad? Simple answer: definitely not. The angel-vs.-devil view isn't only wrong, it's wrong in three big ways. First, the dueling voices aren't good and bad. It's much more nuanced; the little guys don't wear horns or halos. Second, it's never certain which voice to trust. In the old view, we learned early on in life that one voice would bring us more happiness, so we simply decided to always trust that voice and willfully ignore the other. Well, as we'll show throughout this book, not only is it unclear which voice has your best interests in mind, it's also unclear if you can even trust yourself, or your gut for that matter, to decide which one to heed. Both your reasoned thoughts and your intuitions will try to tip you to one side or the other, and sometimes they pull you in different directions. Third, the fight being waged within usually isn't a fair one. For several reasons we'll look at later on, the starting point for the scale, as well as the strength of the mental mechanisms pulling down on each side, can be easily manipulated by external forces, even without our realizing it. The slightest shift in a situation can pump one side with steroids, so to speak, pushing the scale in its direction. In short, character isn't decided by a simple one-off. The story of how we get to be the kind of person we are just got a lot more complicated.

Good vs. bad is so pa.s.se.

Good vs. bad: it seems pretty clear what side you should be on, right? Sure, it might be fun now and again to take a walk on the wild side, but everyone knows that virtue is the way to live the best life. At least that's how the story goes. The only problem is, it's just a story. It might work well for fairy tales and fables, but under the scientific lens it just doesn't hold up. For most people, virtue implies attributes such as honesty, compa.s.sion, generosity, and humility, while vice implies the opposite. Just take a look at the seven deadly sins. There's l.u.s.t, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. The corresponding virtues are chast.i.ty, temperance, charity, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility. Always striving for the good seven and avoiding the bad ones surely will make you saintly, no question about it. But as for happy and successful (in the psychological, material, and biological senses), we're not so sure.

Take generosity and kindness. Sure, these are great ways to behave-to a point. The overly generous can give too much or to the wrong people; the unflinchingly kind can sacrifice their own well-being (or that of their family) just for the sake of being nice. Likewise, in too large doses, humility can leave you stranded on the low rung of the corporate ladder. Charity can wipe out your savings. Patience can leave you waiting in the wings indefinitely. And as for chast.i.ty and temperance ... well, those downsides are obvious. The serious point here is that if taken to extremes, these "virtues" can be quite problematic. If giving to others means depriving yourself too much, and if caring about others' needs means always sacrificing your own, n.o.body wins, because a population of pure altruists simply isn't sustainable. It sounds cynical, but sooner or later the drive for self-interest will kick in one way or another, and the most virtuous will get left behind.9 Similarly, the so-called vices aren't always as bad as one might think. For example, pride can motivate us to develop more skills, spur us to make useful contributions in the workplace and in our communities, and mark us as potentially strong leaders. Wrath and anger can sometimes be the fuel we need to ensure fair play and to fight for things we (and others) deserve. After all, few people would blame a man (or woman) for seeking to punish those who hurt him or those he loves. In fact, not doing so would be seen as a character flaw in many cultures. l.u.s.t might be what first attracts us to a future spouse-the mother or father of our future children. In short, the feelings and behaviors that are generally considered to be "vices" don't always lead to ill.

A more accurate way to understand the complex battle underlying our social behavior is not to think of the scale of character with an angel on one side and a devil on the other, but rather to use a different metaphor-the ant and the gra.s.shopper. If you remember Aesop's fables, you'll recall that the story describes two insects with very different predilections. The ant is always looking to the future-it would rather toil to store away food for winter than enjoy the balminess of a midsummer day at leisure. The gra.s.shopper, on the other hand, sees no point in worrying about the future until it gets here, so it spends its time singing, playing, and enjoying itself. Carpe diem is its motto, at least until autumn comes.

Now, picture the scale of character flanked by these two. On one side we have the mental systems that focus on immediate rewards, or pleasure, in the short term: the gra.s.shopper. On the other side, we have the systems that focus on long-term concerns, or what's best for the future: the ant. The important point to realize, though, is that it's not the case that the gra.s.shopper is always a force for vice. Both the systems of the ant and the gra.s.shopper are looking out for our best interests; they just do so in different time frames. Now, that said, in the fable, the moral is clear: it's better to be like the ant and always be prepared for the future. But while this may be true for ants and make for a nice story, for humans in the real world it's not so simple. You see, for ants, life is all about the long-term survival of the colony-individuals don't matter much. That's not how it is for us. Sure, it's important to look out for our long-term survival by working to be valued by our peers and acting in ways that foster social connections, but it's also important to know when great benefits can come from acting in ways that give us advantages in the here and now. To thrive, then, we need to consider the implications of our actions not just for our reputations, social standing, and ultimate well-being in the long term but also for what we can gain in the short term. Balancing these two is often a tricky business because our short-term interests frequently conflict with our long-term ones, leaving the systems of the ant and gra.s.shopper at odds.

So if we're to use this metaphor, the shortsighted systems of the gra.s.shopper are the ones steering you toward actions and decisions that will bring immediate pleasure and reward. This is the voice telling you to eat the cupcake, buy the new car, screw over a colleague to curry the boss's favor, or play the lottery because you just might win. We know, none of these things sounds particularly virtuous. But hold on a minute. The gra.s.shopper is also the same voice telling you to go demand a promotion from your boss, risk your safety to protect your child, or have spontaneous s.e.x with your spouse-all short-term urges that can contribute to physical, financial, and psychological happiness. If this sounds counterintuitive, it really isn't. Evolution has programmed us to want certain things-fatty food, s.e.x, power-in the short term because they have the potential to increase our evolutionary fitness (i.e., the ability to thrive and thereby raise offspring to the age of s.e.xual maturity). That's why all these things feel good to do, to have, or to consume.

But that's not the end of the story. As we hinted, humans, after all, are a social species. As a result, our evolutionary fitness also depends on having strong long-term relationships-relationships for sharing resources, for raising offspring, for defending against enemies. In fact, long-term stable relationships-or what is often termed social capital-has been shown by the psychologist John Cacioppo and others to be one of the central factors underlying human well-being.10 This raises a problem, however. It's hard to have stable, reciprocal relationships when you're focused only on your own short-term goals. Something, then, has to counteract those short-term, self-focused impulses.

Here is where the systems of the ant come in. They recognize that reaping rewards in the future often requires making sacrifices in the moment. In other words, this is the voice telling you to repay a loan from your friend instead of using that money to buy an iPod, to spend long hours to hone a skill rather than loafing on the couch, to resist the urge to remove your wedding ring and flirt with that hot guy in the bar. Such decisions are surely less rewarding in the short run, but in the long run, they can clearly be beneficial. Your friends will trust you more and continue to share economic resources, you will gain skills that make you an attractive partner or member of society, and your romantic relationship will continue, increasing the chance of raising successful offspring.

As we've said, though, when it comes to character, nothing is black or white. Focusing too much on these long-term rewards can be problematic as well. What if your relationship is already on the rocks and keeping on that ring means you miss meeting the one person (harking back to Governor Sanford) who really is meant to be your "soul mate"? Or what if your single-minded focus on honing some skill makes you miss an experience that makes life worth living? Yes, saving money is a good thing, but never spending can make for a pretty mundane life. Likewise, working hard is admirable, but dedicating yourself solely to the office can deprive you of time with family and friends. Being completely ruled by the ant may seem virtuous at first blush, but it may not always lead to the best-lived life. As research by marketing professors Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan shows, people can come to regret decisions that lead to an overemphasis on long-term outcomes.11 For example, in one study, Kivetz and Keinan found that immediately after returning from winter break, college students reported regretting that they didn't study enough during the break. However, a year later, their primary regret was that they didn't enjoy themselves more when they had the chance. What's more, when Kivetz surveyed Columbia University alums returning for their fortieth reunion, he found that many, even though they had quite successful careers, wistfully reported missing out on some of the pleasures of life. If you're always saving, working, and putting off pleasure for a rainy day, you might just be old and alone by the time that day comes.

So you can see why the ant and the gra.s.shopper are often locked in an ongoing struggle-one that usually occurs outside your awareness-to tip the scale, and thereby your decisions and actions, to their side. They both think they're right in any given situation. Yet at different times and for different reasons, each can serve you well or lead you down the road to ruin. How to decide which to listen to in any given instant? Read on.

Think or blink? Both can screw you up.

Historically, "good" character has been linked with rational thinking and self-control. For the Greek Stoics, for example, virtue came from self-discipline; it sprang from the ability to resist the temptation of life's sensual pleasures. Almost two millennia later, Kant took a similar view. Virtue, for Kant, meant bringing all one's mental faculties under control and using free will as "a power to choose only that which reason, independently of inclination, recognizes to be practically necessary, that is, to be good."12 In essence, all it took to be a good person was to figure out which course of action was best and then make yourself do it. Even in modern psychology, until quite recently anyway, this was the prevailing view: that good character came from learning early on how to silence the irrational voice steering you toward your baser impulses.

Although much research supported this view, the cla.s.sic demonstration comes from the psychologist Walter Mischel.13 This series of studies, which began in the 1960s and became well known as the "marshmallow test," looked at the relationship between self-control and social success. The experiment was as simple as it was elegant. Mischel wanted to examine the mechanisms that gave rise to willpower-the psychological processes that made some children better able to resist temptations than others. But to conduct this research, he first needed a temptation. Simple enough-what kid doesn't like marshmallows? Second, he needed a setup that would allow him to measure willpower, or how well the little ones could resist the sugary goodness. So he had a researcher place a marshmallow on a table in front of each child. The researcher then had to "step away for a few minutes," and made the child an offer: he or she could eat the one marshmallow right away, or wait a few minutes and receive two marshmallows. A simple choice: one now or two later. But maybe not so simple. If you ever have the opportunity to see the videos from these experiments, you'll see just how difficult it was for many of these kids to forgo the treat. Some kids, of course, didn't even try, and gobbled straightaway. But others visibly exerted tremendous psychological effort as they struggled to resist. Still others came up with rather creative strategies. A few covered their eyes with their hands (presumably a.s.suming that what they can't see can't tempt them), and others licked-but didn't eat-the treat.

The upshot of the studies, though, was this: when Mischel followed up with the same individuals-now no longer children-more than a decade later, he found that the kids who had been able to delay the gratification of eating the first marshmallow were the ones who had the most social success later in life. They were viewed as more honest, had stronger relationships, and had achieved more academic success than their gluttonous counterparts. Good character, the researchers claimed, was linked to the early ability to resist and control impulses-to ignore the gra.s.shopper whispering its cravings into one's ear. But that wasn't the whole story.

Economists have a fancy term for decisions like this one that hold different consequences as time unfolds: intertemporal choice. Although not always as clear-cut as with the marshmallows, these types of choices abound in our daily lives. Should I party tonight or stay home to study for the exam? Should I take the $100 I have now and splurge on something I'll enjoy or should I invest it for future gain? Should I love the one I'm with or wait to meet the one I might truly love? In all cases, we logically know that choosing the second option over the first would yield greater rewards in the long term: getting into a better college, having more money when you may need it in the future, forging a stable and loving relationship, et cetera-but people don't always make that choice. Why? Partly because the short-term rewards are often too seductive to resist. Their appeal, studies have found, lies in our innate tendency to underestimate the value of future gains relative to immediate ones-what the economists call temporal discounting. Rationally, this tendency may make little sense, but there is actually an evolutionary logic behind it. Sure, getting $200 in four weeks is usually better than $100 today (a 1,200 percent annual interest rate is hard to beat). But consider the fact that thousands of years ago, we had little way of guaranteeing that we'd see that $200 (or, more precisely, a similar type of reward) a month later. After all, there weren't any stocks, bonds, or legally binding contracts back then, nor could people then (or even now, for that matter) be sure that they'd be around thirty days later. The mind had to find ways to balance the risk of losing an immediate reward against any potential future gains, and therein lies the power of our short-term impulses.

The marshmallow studies are wonderful-clever, methodical, and significant. And they capture the essence of the dueling forces we've been talking about. But they don't paint the whole picture. The results of the marshmallow test suggest that the way to solve the problem of intertemporal choice in the modern world is to use willpower to control our impulses and instincts.14 And it's true that this strategy works sometimes. But it can't, and doesn't, work all the time. As we'll see throughout this book, sometimes heeding our impulses, going with our gut feelings, actually leads to better long-term results.

How do we account for this? Well, again, let's consider it from an evolutionary standpoint. On the evolutionary scale, self-control and discipline are relative newbies. The ability to reason about abstract concepts and weigh the different possible trade-offs of our actions stems from parts of the brain that were far less developed in our ancestors. Yet problems that require taking a long-term view did exist even if the faculties to consciously a.s.sess their consequences didn't. To survive, our progenitors regularly faced challenges requiring cooperation, fairness, reciprocity, and altruism. In some situations they needed to act selflessly in order to maintain interpersonal relationships and avoid the probable doom of social isolation. Consequently, if the only way to delay immediate gratification or short-term impulses were to bring logical reason and self-control to bear, we never would have made it out of the ancestral savannah in the first place. Which is why evolution provided the mind with competing instincts and intuitions-some focused on gain in the here and now, others urging us to delay gratification and focus on what is to come.

What we often call our gut feelings, our intuitions, are really urgings of an older mind trying to push us in a given direction. We might not even notice these feelings, as often they seem quite in accord with what we consciously believe we should do. For example, when you consciously decide that you shouldn't lie to someone, you aren't necessarily aware of that guilty feeling that was lurking underneath to push you toward honesty. However, in those instances where what we feel we should do and what we think we should do are at odds, the urgings of the older mind are hard to ignore. This is why even when you consciously decide it might be in your best interests to lie ("I believe that $100 bill you found on the floor is mine" or "No, I wasn't flirting"), you usually have to work hard to ignore that pang in your gut.

Religious dogmas and ethical philosophies are some of the tools the conscious mind uses-or at least thinks it does-to choose how to behave with respect to issues of character. Those of you who, like us, spent many long hours in Sunday school (or some other religious instruction) probably learned that these belief systems are usually aimed at tamping down those "irrational" and "selfish" impulses. Giving in to those urges, you probably were told, can only get you into trouble-especially when those urges are adolescent ones. But as we noted, from an evolutionary point of view, if these intuitive urges were solely selfish, they wouldn't have been doing their job. No, these older systems had to balance long-term and short-term gains just like our more recently evolved rational mind does. So while we may feel an urge to lie to protect our interests, we also feel guilt at so doing. While we feel anger or disgust toward certain people, we also feel compa.s.sion when we see others in pain. These emotional responses are the currency of the older, intuitive mind-they are the automatic engines that push us to behave one way or the other.

You can think of these feelings as the opening gambits of the ant and the gra.s.shopper. They represent the initial position of the character scale based on an ancient and intuitive calculus. Yet immediately following this first move, the battle to tip the scale continues as we bring to bear conscious will and a.n.a.lysis. Conscious reasoning, however, takes a little time, so how we act in any given situation is partly determined by when in the decision process we act. The more rapidly we act-the more quickly we make a decision-the more our behavior will be influenced by the intuitive systems. The longer we take to think about it, the more conscious motives and a.n.a.lysis come into play, for better or for worse.

For example, if our homeless hero Farron Hall had taken even a few extra seconds to decide whether or not to jump into the Red River, he might never have risked his life to save a complete stranger. Instead, he listened to his instincts-ones born out of a venerable algorithm tipping us toward the long-term benefits of altruism-and acted before he could reflect.15 True, poor impulse control may have created a whole host of problems in his daily life-addiction to alcohol and the like-but in that one moment, heeding his intuitions steered him toward a truly selfless act.

Before we turn to the third big problem with the common view of character, we want to emphasize one final and important point. Recently there has been an ongoing debate (fueled largely by the booming field of behavioral economics and the popularity of books on decision making) over whether it's better to trust judgments that are consciously reasoned or intuitive ones that occur in a blink. Well, when it comes to character at least, the answer is both and neither. In actuality, the question itself is misguided. You see, both the older and newer "minds" developed to serve the same goal: balancing long-term and short-term interests. Reason is a newer tool on the evolutionary continuum, but it serves the same master as instinct does. Although the ability to reason brings innumerable benefits, it's no guarantee of virtue. After all, many malevolent or dishonest acts can be justified if you're willing to engage in some "reasoning." As you'll see many times throughout this book, "irrational" or intuitive mechanisms don't always lead to the best results, but they don't always lead to misguided ones either. The same goes for so-called rational mechanisms. Remember, the struggle between the ant and the gra.s.shopper plays out on the battlefields of both the ancient and modern minds, and neither side always holds the better answers.

It's usually not a fair fight.

At this point, we've described how character may be better understood not as a set of fixed traits but rather as a temporary state-like a tug-of-war with short-term interests on one end and long-term interests on the other. We've also argued that neither intuition nor reason is always optimal-both can lead you astray. Okay, but there's one more kink in this system to consider. In the old view of character, the battle between the angel and devil was fought on a level playing field, with both having equal opportunities to present their case. If only life were that fair!

As we'll see throughout this book, these dueling psychological forces aren't always equal in strength. More often than not, one has an advantage over the other, but it's also a fragile balance of power that can shift from one minute to the next, depending on the situation or context. For example, most of us would feel a pang of guilt over cheating someone in a business deal, right? That's because our inner ant knows that in the long run, being known as a cheater likely will come back to haunt us. The scale tips toward the ant. But what if, at the moment just before you were confronted with a decision about whether to cheat, you watched a funny clip on YouTube? The good feeling the short clip produced can trick the mind by counteracting the pang of guilt that would normally accompany your deceit, and in so doing, it can aid the gra.s.shopper in its efforts to pursue expedient cheating.16 The scale now moves the other way. Shifts in this balance of power can come from internal changes as well-as when raging hormones make you suddenly feel powerless to resist the person you have your eye on. The point here is that the mind is subject to many sources of bias. Simple exposure to extraneous cues or information can influence our decisions without us even realizing it.

It's these kinds of cues, whether they're relevant or not to the decision at hand, that can determine which of the dueling mechanisms is more powerful at a given time. And just as the balance of power moves back and forth, so too do the behaviors that mark our "character."

Character is as character does.

So what is character, then? That's a question we hope to have answered by the time you finish this book. At this point, we realize that we've asked you to take a lot on faith. We've asked you to accept that character isn't a fixed, deep-seated trait but rather a variable state; that a dishonest act doesn't make a person dishonest across the board; that the moral mind isn't subject to saintly and sinful urges; that neither reason nor intuition always provides the best answers. And finally we've asked you to accept that many of the decisions people believe reflect character are actually swayed by external forces of which they are not aware.

We don't expect you to take our word for all this on argument alone, and we wouldn't want you to. We're not philosophers-we're scientists. And as scientists, we find truth about human behavior by putting people in controlled settings where we can manipulate a number of variables and study what they actually do. Even the most logically beautiful theories or thought experiments can't hold a candle to real-world data.

We take pride in designing experiments that provide a window into the best and worst sides of human nature-situations that, even though conducted in a lab, come as close as humanly possible to replicating the ones that people confront in their daily lives. We've made it our life's work to find out, scientifically, why people choose to do what they do-and we're not above using a little trickery to get the information we're after. This isn't just to make our experiments more fun or interesting (though that's an added bonus); it's because psychologists have found that people don't act naturally in the lab if they know what behavior is being studied. So we've told some tall tales and put some unwitting folks in the middle of some elaborately staged scenarios and conflicts, but it's all in the name of science. Procedures are always cleared by review boards, and partic.i.p.ants are always made aware of the deception at the experiment's end. No one has gotten too mad at us yet. More often than not, once our partic.i.p.ants find out they were tricked, they are interested to learn why they made the decisions they did.

It's through these real-world-type experiments that we can find out what leads people to hurt others or help them, to break the rules or honor them, to seek revenge or take the high road, to mate for life or have a series of one-night stands, and so on. We've designed experiments that test everything from whether people will cheat one another to whether they'll punish straying partners, help someone who got screwed over, show prejudice toward groups they don't even know, step up as a leader, or act like a hypocrite. What's more, each of our experiments, in one way or another, is designed to reveal something about not only what people will do but also why they do it. In this book, we'll welcome you into our lab and invite you to tag along with us as we conduct these experiments and others. Along the way, we'll share with you what we and other researchers have found about the workings of the social mind. We intend to leave you not only with a new understanding of why you do what you do and how your "character" works, but also with scientifically tested strategies for gaining some control over it.

2 / HYPOCRISY VS. MORALITY.

Why no one should throw stones.

It was the eve of Valentine's Day, 2008, when George slipped out the side door of one of Washington, D.C.'s most luxurious hotels. All the pieces for the night's romantic rendezvous were in place-he had secured a lavish suite, arranged for his lover's ride to the encounter, and made sure the champagne was on ice. He had even carved out several hours for this tryst, which, for a man of his stature, attested to its importance. George was a powerful man of powerful means. He'd spent the majority of his career in n.o.ble pursuits, fighting depravity and corruption of every type, protecting the little guy at every turn. George was under a lot of pressure; tonight, he told himself, he deserved a night off.

As he entered the grand lobby of the hotel and headed toward the elevator, his pulse quickened in antic.i.p.ation of the romantic pleasures that awaited him. But George Fox, as Eliot Spitzer preferred to be called when he checked into the Mayflower Hotel, wasn't going to meet his wife. No, that night Governor Spitzer, who himself had famously crusaded against the scourge of prost.i.tution in New York, working tirelessly to put hundreds of johns behind bars, was in fact a john himself, and he was about to be publicly outed in a major scandal that would destroy both his image and his career virtually overnight.

What's more, that night at the Mayflower wasn't one single dalliance, one isolated moral lapse. No, this anti-prost.i.tution poster boy was a regular client of the Emperor's Club and had spent many hours-and thousands of dollars-in the company of the highest-cla.s.s call girls. Here was a man who had made ethics and integrity the hallmarks of his administration, a man who loudly and repeatedly decried the decline of good old American family values. Yet Eliot Spitzer (or "Client #9," as he was to become known) would in one month's time be implicated in the most famous prost.i.tution case of the decade and immortalized in history books as the very paragon of moral hypocrisy.

Of course, Spitzer is hardly an anomaly. In our society, examples of hypocrisy abound. Consider how Rush Limbaugh railed against the moral failings of drug abusers while he just happened to be racking up an impressive collection of illegal prescriptions to feed his oxycodone habit. Or how Senator Larry Craig, who very publicly admonished President Bill Clinton for being a "bad boy, a naughty boy," during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, was caught soliciting s.e.xual favors in men's restroom stalls (and, by the way, he was a fierce opponent of gay rights as well).1 And it's not just politicians. Think about how countless sports icons, from Mark McGwire to Barry Bonds, Marion Jones, and others, have condemned fellow athletes for the use of performance-enhancing drugs, only to later be implicated in juicing scandals themselves. Or how William Bennett, probably one of the best-known advocates for moral education in this country, a pundit who repeatedly and vocally extolled the benefits of self-control and restraint in his best-selling tome The Book of Virtues, was, during the many years he spent promulgating this message, a gambler extraordinaire. While his political organization, Empower America, was publishing editorials decrying lawmakers who "pollute our society with a slot machine on every corner," he was playing stakes so high that he gambled up to $1.4 million in a single two-month period.2 As each one of these people fell from grace quickly and publicly, most of us couldn't help wondering what they had been thinking. How could they have been such hypocrites? How could they have done the exact opposite of what they proclaimed to be virtuous behavior? These are all good questions, and they've been exhaustively debated. But they're the wrong ones to ask. It's not that these people ignored or purposely defied what they thought was right. No, it's that what they thought was right was relative. As we'll show in this chapter, hypocrisy isn't so much a matter of violating your own moral beliefs as it is of shifting your moral beliefs to suit your needs and desires at any given point in time. So the right question isn't whether Spitzer and the rest knew what they were doing was wrong. Rather, we should ask how their minds tricked them into believing, at that particular moment, that what they were doing was okay.

Now, you may still be thinking, "But everyone knows politicians and celebrities are an exceptionally questionable lot when it comes to morals. They're not like the rest of us good folks. We certainly would never act like that, would we?" Well, that question raises an interesting point. Is hypocrisy a trait confined to a few bad seeds? Or might the potential to act hypocritically lurk in all of us? Given our theoretical view, we suspected the later. Not because we believe human beings are inherently flawed or morally bankrupt but because, as we discussed in Chapter 1, the mind is subject to a constant and often hidden battle that frequently drives us to say or do one thing one minute, only to turn around and do the very opposite the next.

But how exactly does this battle play out? How can we experience such powerful and seismic swings in our beliefs about right and wrong? This is exactly what we were dying to find out. But there was just one problem: how to study hypocrisy in the lab. Clearly, we couldn't just ask people whether or not they would violate their beliefs in a given situation; after all, no one thinks he or she is a hypocrite, and even if some people did, we sincerely doubted they'd be willing to admit it. No, we needed to create situations where people would have something to gain by going against their stated values-situations that provided as close an approximation of a real-world moral dilemma, with all its true temptations, as possible. So we did what we always do: we staged a situation to put people's moral calculus to the test, to see how'd they actually behave when push came to shove. In essence, we conned them. Hey, it's all in the name of science.

But there was one more complication: to study hypocrisy, we had to see not only how people would evaluate their own behavior but also how they would evaluate the same behaviors when they were committed by others. This meant we needed a "bad guy," an accomplice (or what psychologists call a confederate) we could count on to do something morally questionable so that we could see how the true partic.i.p.ants would react. Enter Alex. Alex was one of those fine students who was so intrinsically interested in the workings of the human mind that he was willing to risk the wrath of his peers by acting as the universal jerk (for lack of a better word) in our studies. He agreed to repeatedly screw over other students and let them judge him for it. Now that takes guts!

Meet your inner hypocrite.

"Maybe I can get out of here early," James thought as Carlo Valdesolo left him alone in the lab. James was there to take part in an experiment that he believed (okay, because we told him so) was examining problem-solving skills. When James arrived, Carlo sat him at a computer and told him that he would need to complete one of two tasks. One was a fun and easy photo hunt that would take only about ten minutes. The other task was a series of logic problems that Carlo warned might be difficult and might take as long as forty-five minutes to complete. But, as Carlo next explained, he, as the experimenter, needed to be kept "blind" as to which task James and the other partic.i.p.ants would complete so that he wouldn't bias their performance in any way (a false but believable tale; you'll see why we needed it in a minute). "So," Carlo went on, "certain partic.i.p.ants are going to be randomly selected to a.s.sign themselves-and, therefore, the person going after them-to one of the two tasks. The tasks alternate, so the next person will complete whatever task the first person doesn't." James just happened to be one of these "deciders." (In reality, of course, all our subjects were "deciders.") Next Carlo casually told James that most people believe the fairest way to make a choice is to flip a coin, and handed over a computerized device that flipped a virtual coin, "just in case you want to use it." Then Carlo left.

Now came the fun part (for us, that is): showtime on the hidden cameras. James sat back in his seat, looked at the coin flipper, looked back at his computer screen, and did what a whopping 92 percent of his fellow partic.i.p.ants would also do-a.s.signed himself to the quick, easy task without using the flipper. And in so doing, he knowingly doomed the next soul to forty-five minutes of drudgery. Then, just as James finished the short task, the computer posed the following question to him (which, of course, was the point of the whole experiment, even though he didn't know it): "How fairly, on a scale ranging from not at all to very much, did you act in the a.s.signment procedure?"

It's a simple but telling question, as it requires people to evaluate the rightness of their actions on a very fundamental dimension-fairness. When we tallied the results, we found that the people who a.s.signed themselves the easy task, like James, rated their actions on average somewhere near the middle-they believed their behavior to be not completely fair but not terribly egregious either. Simply put, they believed taking the easy task at someone else's expense was a somewhat acceptable thing to do.3 "Okay," you might be wondering, "so what? Maybe most people don't see this behavior as such a bad thing. That doesn't make them hypocrites." But wait, we weren't done yet. Soon it was Jack's turn. Jack also was there to take part in a study that was purportedly about problem solving. This time, however, we made one important change to the experiment. Carlo told Jack that he wouldn't be solving any problems. Instead, his job was to provide feedback on the experiment and problem-solving tasks as an observer. Jack, then, was to surrept.i.tiously watch (via webcam on his computer) as another person went through that same procedure James had just completed. That meant he'd be able to see and hear everything that happened in the session, including whether the person flipped the virtual coin or just took the easy task for him- or herself. Then Jack would be asked his opinions about the whole process. Simple enough.

Jack readily agreed to partic.i.p.ate, enjoying the idea of playing the somewhat stealthy role of the "secret watcher." At this point, Alex, our universal "bad guy," entered the room. Jack watched and listened as Alex received his instructions from Carlo. They were the same as before. Alex was told about the two tasks, and that he was selected to be the decider. He was presented with the virtual coin flipper and then left alone. Jack then watched as Alex looked at the flipping device, shook his head slightly, turned back to his computer, and a.s.signed himself the preferable task. Next Jack's computer stopped showing what Alex was doing in the other room and asked for Jack's feedback on the experimental procedures, including his opinion of how fairly Alex acted. This part of the experiment was repeated forty-five more times, all with different "Jacks."

In this version, ratings were not so charitable. Jack and the other "watchers" universally condemned Alex for choosing the good option for himself. To them, the decision was completely unfair and immoral, and even colored their opinion about poor Alex himself. Jack wasn't the only one who gave Alex a dirty look when pa.s.sing him in the hallway after the experiment; one woman even stopped to lean in, look disparagingly at him, and whisper, "I know what you did." Alex was shunned, a moral outcast. Good thing for him he was graduating soon.

Now, remember, in both of the situations we posed, the same decision occurred: one person chose to a.s.sign himself the preferable task at another's expense rather than risking a coin flip. The only difference is who was judging the choice: the person who made it or an outside observer. Yet that was enough to produce wildly different answers to the question of fairness. If the scales of morality were fixed, this shouldn't happen-the answers should be the same regardless of whether people were judging themselves or someone else. An act of cheating should be dishonest, an act of selfishness should be selfish, no matter who committed it. The "badness" of a transgression shouldn't depend on the ident.i.ty of the transgressor, right? But this is not what happened. People judged the selfish act as far less morally reprehensible when they committed it than when someone else (Alex) did. And it wasn't that one group simply had higher moral standards than the other-we a.s.signed students to the two conditions randomly, as we do in all our experiments, to control for this type of complication. Here, then, we had the very picture of hypocrisy, among the most normal of people.

Now, it's true that sticking someone with thirty-five extra minutes of work isn't exactly a sin on the scale of cheating on one's wife with a high-cla.s.s hooker. Still, these results tell us a great deal about the nature of hypocrisy and why it's so easy for any of us to fall into its grip. First, they show that our judgments of what is a morally acceptable action seem to be quite fluid. Second, they tell us that our short-term impulses for rewards in the moment-whether those rewards are a night of uninhibited pa.s.sion with a stranger or getting out of a tedious lab experiment in time for happy hour-can temporarily squelch the voice reminding us about the benefits of a solid reputation in the long term. It's not that we silence this voice purposely, or even consciously; it's a result of the ongoing battle we've been talking about between our short-term interests and our long-term ones. When we act hypocritically, then, it's often not that we're ignoring or deliberately disregarding our beliefs and morals; it's merely that our short-term concerns have momentarily triumphed. That's exactly what happened in this experiment. The people who judged themselves more leniently for taking the easy task weren't aware that they were allowing their minds to adjust their beliefs about right and wrong to serve their immediate interests. It's just that when our inner gra.s.shopper-our desire for short-term rewards-wins us over, we're very good at rationalizing our actions, tricking ourselves into believing that what we did wasn't wrong.

At this point, you may be wondering what happened to the mental mechanisms of the ant, the ones that are supposed to protect us from being socially ostracized by steering us toward fairness and honesty. We had the same question. If hypocrisy were allowed to run completely unfettered, how could we ever trust anyone's judgments or even our own? Selfishness would reign, stable relationships would be impossible to sustain, and our social order would essentially fall apart. So the mechanisms of the ant must be working to some extent, trying to put the brakes on shortsighted, self-serving judgments. In the case of hypocrisy, we figured those mechanisms would look a lot like guilt. The problem, though, was that with the current experiment, we couldn't tell whether the desire to avoid the unpleasant task had trumped the guilt or whether those students simply hadn't felt any guilt at all. To answer this question, we had to go back to the lab.

As