Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Is everyone likely to cheat?

Steven Levitt makes a remark in his book Freakonomics that ‘Everyone cheats…if the stakes are right’. What would you do if one day you were to magically become invisible, would you still live your life with the same principles; he asks.

I’m not sure what the answer is. But in my mind, ‘conscience’ & ‘fear of getting caught’, are completely different things.

1 comment:

Jayne said...

Ask anyone who's cheated if they ever feared getting caught & they'd probably tell you it only added to the excitement & that despite the 'fear' they still went ahead with cheating anyway. As for the conscience - well, the person who cheats is the one who has to live with the conscience & 9 times out of 10 it gets to them so much that they have to 'fess up.
The human being is such a complex thing hey!