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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:01.698)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Christian Miller, the AC Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. And we're here to talk about his book, Honesty, The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue. Dr. Miller, wonderful to have you on today.
Christian Miller (00:18.912)
It's great to see you. I'm really looking forward to our conversation about honesty and maybe other things too.
PJ (00:23.278)
Let me say first that I was surprised to get a hardcover in the mail. And so thank you for that. It's a beautiful book. And I was also excited to find out that this is actually your mom's artwork on the front. So do you want to talk just a little bit about that? mean, because at first I was like, why are there giraffes? That's actually how I found you was on X people talking about like, are there giraffes? So can you talk a little bit about that?
Christian Miller (00:36.672)
It is.
Christian Miller (00:47.744)
Yeah, it has nothing really to do with the content of the book. I mean, I could try and stretch it. That's bad. I'd say like, you know, sticking your neck out for the truth and like taking a chance and that kind of thing. But if I'm really being honest, which seems appropriate, this is my mother's artwork. And I just wanted to have an opportunity to feature it on the cover of a book. So it looks like a photograph, but it's actually her hyper realistic nature artwork, which I've also featured in other books.
PJ (00:53.474)
Hahaha!
Christian Miller (01:16.49)
For those who are watching this in video form, you can see I'm holding up copies of other books I've done where I just like to show off her work. is really hyper talented and I take any chance I get to brag about her, put it that way. So, we got the best character about Bella.
PJ (01:28.952)
Yeah, it's amazing. sorry, I just had to mention it. That's yeah. So apart from showcasing your mother's incredible artwork, why write this book?
Christian Miller (01:42.144)
So I've been working on the topic of character more generally for 15 years now. So it was not a big shift for me to continue to talk about character, but I had been talking about it in very general terms about character and virtue kind of writ large. And after a while, I kind of said what I want to say in some earlier books and I was looking for something a little bit different to do. And so I was thinking, what could I do that's still in the character realm, but would challenge me to kind of stretch in new directions? And I thought,
Well, are there any virtues that are getting neglected by philosophers in particular, but just in general by academics? And so I thought, you know, well, maybe some more obscure ones, but surely not some big ones like generosity. Well, lo and behold, neglected by philosophers. Patience, lo and behold, neglected by philosophers. And then there's this one that came along. Honesty, I thought, you no chance. Surely of all the virtues out there, there would have been tons of work on there. And it...
PJ (02:36.265)
Hehehehehe
Christian Miller (02:39.872)
on honesty and it wasn't. In fact, the last 50 years there's been, I can't even count to five, the number of articles have been written by philosophers on honesty. So it's neglected virtue in the sense that this very little attention has been paid to it, when I think it's an extremely important virtue, one that we should be paying a lot more attention to and as a society we desperately need. So that's what kind of initially got me going on it. And I thought, well, do I have anything to say about it? So I tried out
some initial views at conferences, kind of got the feedback of the audience. Does this sound interesting and engaging? And people were really into it. Question and answer was packed with all kinds of challenging and great suggestions and objections to me. And so I kind of just snowballed from there. I kind of responded to them and developed my view further. And as it goes in philosophy, you start with an article, then it can blow up into multiple articles and eventually became a book project. So that's how it came about. And in fact,
I'm not even done with it now because I want to do this book in a more popular outlet or more popular form of it going forward. So this is a little bit more of an academic book and I want to take it and repackage it for a non-academic audience and get the audience out even more so than they have already.
PJ (03:59.894)
It is interesting, especially from the academic world. You think that academics would write about honesty because it's something that they deal with all the time.
Christian Miller (04:07.776)
I would think so. to be fair, in some areas of academia, it gets more discussion than others. So it's not like it's just completely abandoned throughout the entire halls of academia. But in the case of philosophy, I would have thoughts, had your thought too. And I've been asked, know, what explains this? Why has it been neglected? And I think I don't have the complete answer. Part of it surely has to do with the comparative neglect of virtue and virtue ethics in general in philosophy.
So that was a movement that was really influential in ancient Greece, kind of died out during the Enlightenment period, even into the 20th century was not that popular, but then had a big comeback in the 1970s and 1980s with the kind of restoration of virtue ethics is probably the label that's most familiar to listeners. So when that happens, there was a lot of attention to virtue in general and virtue as a...
basis for an ethical theory and how we should live our lives and right and wrong and good and bad. But it was kind of a slower to catch up on particular virtues and theorizing about justice, theorizing about temperance and honesty and courage and the particular one. So that has only been coming along more recently. So to some extent, many of the particular virtues have been neglected, but not all of them. So if you go in the philosophy literature, you find that something like humility has gotten lots of attention.
Humility and yet comparatively honesty has it and I think there maybe the final work suggestion I have to offer is You might think initially there's not much to say about Some virtues are like like they're complicated multifaceted, know, what is humility? Does it involve like thinking that you're in a lowly state and other people there different so many different theories of humility Honesty is like well, what's there to talk about? mean, it's like, you know, tell the truth don't tell lies
PJ (05:57.71)
Ha!
Christian Miller (06:01.344)
Keep your promises and you're not as person and we're done. How could you even write a book about it? Well turns out there's tons of stuff to say lots of really fascinating puzzles and hopefully even if people don't it by my view at least they're going to be Intrigued enough by the issues to want to tell me what I'm wrong Why I'm wrong and put forward an alternative view and that's that's progress in philosophy. So
PJ (06:24.428)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you're very open about that in the book that you are just getting the conversation started because it should be starting. And I appreciate that. And I think there's something to what you're saying, at least in my mind, that there was just a lot of work that needed to be done to justify virtue ethics. And everyone was focused on doing that. And then afterwards, they're like, wait, wait, so what's, you know.
Christian Miller (06:33.404)
Yeah.
PJ (06:49.132)
We built up like a fort and like a wall, know, everything, maybe some foundations, but we don't have a home to live in. What are these ethics that we're promoting?
Christian Miller (06:57.566)
And it's particular virtues. mean, if you're talking about the virtuous person and your theory of ethics is, you should do what the virtuous person would do in the circumstances, or you should perform the action which the virtues lead you to perform, or different ways of spelling it out. Well, then you probably needed to say something about what is the character of a virtuous person look like? What are the particular character traits that constitute that character? And then, you know, they're very different. And so you need to unpack magnanimity. Is that a good virtue or not? Humility, is that a virtue or not? What does it look like? What form does
each of these specifically take and as has not been done, at least to my satisfaction. Yeah. So in some ways it's, it's there for the taking for philosophers who want a career in ethics. There are dissertations, there are books, there are careers that could be made just looking at these particular virtues that have been neglected and running with that and saying a lot more than what's been said already.
PJ (07:51.499)
And I'm really fascinated too by your approach. It's not one that I've run into a little bit, but not much that you take kind of this metaphysical side of arguments and then you marry it with empirical psychology. Can you talk a little bit about how you balance and connect those two? The phrase that you use in the book, because you don't actually talk about it in the book, you talk about it elsewhere. That's that kind of justification you've done in other books.
is that character traits have a metaphysical nature and they're irreducible to mere patterns of behavior. So can you explain that for us and kind of why you felt the need to move into empirical psychology and how you marry that with this metaphysical concept?
Christian Miller (08:36.736)
Yep, yep, yep, yeah, great. So, let me, this is gonna be a two-part answer. The first part is just what am I doing with respect to honesty? And then the second part will be about the metaphysics of character traits more generally. So with respect to honesty, I approach it from two directions. First direction is just kind of traditional conceptual analysis that philosophers do. So we're taking this concept of honesty of the honest person.
And I'm thinking really hard about that concept and I'm trying to unpack it. And I'm thinking about, what is the behavioral side of honesty? What is the cognitive or the more thinking side of honesty? What is the more motivational and emotional side of honesty? And I'm not doing any empirical work here. I'm just kind of giving you, if I can, necessary and sufficient conditions, or at least just kind of characterizing what an honest person is like conceptually.
And so I'm going to talk about things like what beliefs would I expect an honest person to have? What kind of motivational profile would I expect the honest person to feature? Would that include self-interested motivation or not? What kind of patterns of behavior would you see? Does honesty pertain to lying, cheating, stealing, bullshitting, and other actions like that? So that's all going to be on the conceptual side. That fits very much with a kind of traditional model of philosophy where it's more armchair philosophy, more conceptual analysis.
So let's put that in one corner. In another corner, I've got this empirical approach. And here, what I wanna see is not the concept of honesty or an honest person, but how honest are people in fact? So I wanna, having now clarified what it is to be honest, I wonder to what extent do people actually live up to the standards of honesty and being an honest person?
And for that kind of question, I can't just do armchair philosophizing, because now we're actually dealing with real-world empirical information about how people's character actually is constituted. And so for that, I could go in variety of different directions. I could go to religion. I could go to history. I could go to popular events, because after all, there's plenty of stuff in the world today that pertains to honesty.
Christian Miller (10:58.688)
But none of that gave me the kind of the kind of scientific more rigorous careful Source of evidence that I was looking for To make conclusions about what most people's character tends to be like the only place I could look there was empirical psychology where you would have experiments which would put people into different situations where they had the opportunity to lie or not lie steal or not steal cheat or not cheat and then there would be
different incentive structures in place, different pressures, different motives will be tapped into and then see how they behave. Do they tend to behave honestly or not? And so from looking at a kind of compilation of a variety of different studies, and maybe we'll have time to get into some of them later, but just methodologically looking at a compilation of these different studies, I could draw tentative conclusions about are most people honest, are most people dishonest or somewhere in between? So how you put this whole thing together then,
Here are the standards of honesty. Here are what people actually are like. And then how well do they line up? Are most people actually lining up to the standards of honesty? Are they meeting those standards? Or are they falling short of those standards? Well, lo and behold, sorry to cut to the chase and give it away, but most people are falling short of the standards of honesty. Big surprise, big revelation. So there's a gap between the two.
PJ (12:17.198)
Spoiler alert.
Christian Miller (12:24.584)
There's what we should aim for and then what we are actually like and so what happens in the very end of the book, which happens in many of my other writings too, is what strategies can we adopt to try and close the gap? So for me, it's actually three steps. There's the kind of goal or the standard. There's the empirical reality. And then there's the kind of character improvement or character development, which can help bring the empirical reality closer to
the standard, shrink the character gap so their actual character better reflects the kind of character we should have. Now that's all, that was a lot, but it doesn't even get to your metaphysics stuff. So if you can give me one more minute or maybe a couple of minutes. So you also asked about the metaphysical side of this. So for those listeners, that's jargony stuff. We're just talking about the kind of nature of character traits in general.
PJ (13:08.14)
No worries.
Christian Miller (13:23.36)
Metaphysics is kind of the philosophy of reality or the nature of reality. And so when we're having a metaphysical discussion about character, now this will be abstracting from honesty specifically. This will be about all character traits, which include virtues and vices. So honesty and dishonesty on the other side of the virtues spectrum. This will be a kind of a discussion about all character traits.
And we're going to think about how do character traits, are part of our psychology, relate to the rest of our psychology? Because after all, we have beliefs, have desires, have emotions, have intentions, we have these kind of more familiar, ordinary folk psychological mental states, to use more jargon, or parts of our minds that we speak about all the time. I believe this, I want this, I intend to do this.
How do character traits kind of find a home in our minds, where they reside? And there are two basic pictures about this, the metaphysics of character traits. One is to say that they're kind of separate entities, they're separate things that exist in your mind. They take up space alongside this other stuff, well, they're closely related to it. But you know, honesty and any of all these other things too. And that would be what we call a non-reductive picture.
So that they're distinct separate things in the mind I don't hold that picture Because I hold the opposite picture which is more what we call a reductive picture and on that picture you take the art of traits and you just Equate them or reduce them to these more familiar things so Because we'll get into honesty more in a minute. Let's shift examples take something like compassion
I think compassion's a virtue. I think it's real, exists in some people. It leads to thoughts, feelings, and behavior. But it's not something above and beyond. More familiar beliefs about why it's important to help people, desires to help people, intentions to help people, beliefs about when it's appropriate to help people, when it's not appropriate to help people.
Christian Miller (15:52.068)
All these more familiar things, when you put them together, are just equal to the virtue of compassion. That's just what compassion is. It's a collection of the relevance, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so forth, that have to do with helping people in need. And so, you know, this may not be too esoteric or too academic, but I like this picture.
because it takes away a lot of the mystery associated with character traits. They're not mysterious entities. They don't have their own causal powers. They don't do extra work in the minds, and we have to kind of find them in the mind. No, they're just the same as more familiar things we're familiar with. So I'll stop there.
PJ (16:38.734)
Great answer. yes, definitely take your time as you're answering us. That's why we're doing a long form podcast. So you're good. I look at this, you mentioned the irreducibility to mere patterns of behavior. And I think that there's a key phrase there. It's not that it excludes patterns of behavior. It's that it's not just mere patterns of behavior. that, so to understand what you're saying, I just want to make sure I'm the right track.
Christian Miller (16:46.816)
You
PJ (17:08.846)
It includes things like patterns of behavior, but also things like beliefs and knowledge. that kind of... And there's probably more things that we could, if we wanted to, we could add to that definition. But your point is to remove the mystery.
Christian Miller (17:15.498)
Yep, yep, yep, yep, very good, very good.
Christian Miller (17:21.216)
Yep.
Yep, yep, that's right. So let me expand on that. you take compassion again.
If you here's a very I think overly simple way to think about compassion like compassionate person That person is compassionate compassionate If they help someone one time They just do one helping action And I want to say no, that's that's a good start. Maybe there's more to being a compassionate person than just that That's performing a compassionate action. You did one helping thing, but that's not nearly enough to be a compassionate person
And so, okay, you say, well, maybe it's more than one action. Maybe they help two times or three times or four times or five times. But it's always helping by volunteering at their local food bank. And I say, no, no, no, no, no, that's good too, that's better. But I would expect someone to help in a variety of different circumstances if they're a compassionate person, not just at the food bank. I'd expect them to help at the shopping mall, expect them to make donations to charity, expect them to be...
Helpful in variety of situations, okay, and it's well, okay. Let's add that so now we've got a pattern of behavior That's helpful across a variety of situations and let's say it's stable over time So it's not just like on Tuesday and never again, but a week in a week out Is that enough for compassion and I say now we're making now we're doing it. We're kind of chugging along We're making progress here, but we're not there yet because we haven't said anything about what is responsible for that behavior
Christian Miller (19:02.56)
Why does the person do those things? And then for that, we have to kind of go into their mind and maybe we can't find the answer, but at least in their mind, there's some kind of psychology behind the behavior, what's leading them to do the behavior. So, you know, it wouldn't be any good in my mind or in my way of thinking to say, this person does all these helpful behaviors, but they do it only to make a good impression on their significant other.
or they make all these donations to charity just to get the tax write off. Or they're doing all these things to get reward in the afterlife. If it's just crudely self-interested motivation behind the behavior, then you don't have the virtue of compassion. So it has to be appropriate motivation. And there's an old story about what that is. But the point being, now we're getting into the psychology. It matters why you do the action. And the same thing is also true for beliefs. If the person does these things, but just by accident,
without thinking about them, and they don't have any beliefs about why it's important to help people, it's good to help people, they were actually trying to do something completely different and they just like, locked into this. That doesn't count as compassion either. So now the story that emerges is character traits are multifaceted. They are behavioral for sure, but they're also psychological. And so you can't reduce a character trait just to patterns of behavior. You can't reduce
A character trait just to patterns of motivation. can't reduce your character trait just to patterns of beliefs. You have to have all these different components in place. And then if they are the right components, you're gonna have a virtue of compassion. If they're bad components, you're gonna have a vice of, pick your favorite vice. And the same story will now tie this back to honesty. We'll carry over to honesty. So look.
make it try and make it even more relatable. The person who, you know, tells the truth a lot, that's a good start. But that's not enough to be an honest person, to have the virtue of honesty. They have to have the appropriate motivation, appropriate beliefs, and they have to do other things besides telling the truth too. They have to, with respect to other forms of behavior like promises, stealing, cheating, and so forth, they have to behave well there.
Christian Miller (21:26.932)
And then you put all that together and you're gonna get the virtue monastic. So hopefully that sheds some more light.
PJ (21:31.052)
Yeah. one, just thought he saw me laughing a little bit. I really love this idea of like, I mean, pick your favorite vice. that, that phrase struck me funny. I love that. Just like, you know, pick one. Yeah. That's like, that's how people do it. Right. They had like, but, there was a definite feel of, I'm a devout Christian. So this is where my mind goes of
How many times do I have to be compassionate seven times that sounds like a lot it's like 70 times seven like like the number of perfection and keep going right and There's this interesting thing where we have these They seem to be a different class of virtues and I might be going off topic here, but I'm curious what you think things like perseverance and diligence are considered virtues
Christian Miller (21:58.016)
Yeah.
PJ (22:21.634)
and they function differently and it seems to be they function alongside making the other virtues possible. Like in terms of, you know, if someone's honest their whole life and then there's a great big lie at the end of their life, you know, or they do something cruel to the poor at the end of their life, there really does seem to be need to be you finish strong, you finish well. There's that development of character and then there's the completion, maturation and fruition of character. And so...
Christian Miller (22:44.96)
Yeah.
PJ (22:51.934)
A lot of what you're talking about there, you could put into the terminology of perseverance and diligence. Is that a good way? Like, I mean, you're constantly doing it, and you're doing it for a long time. Is that-
Christian Miller (23:00.104)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's nice. That's nice. That's nice. So let me, I've got two thoughts about this.
Maybe maybe more than two but here here too initially So let's keep in mind that virtues come in degrees. So when you first said, you know, how many times should I be helpful? People people are gonna different different degrees the number of times are helpful and the expectation might be that you're supposed to be helpful all the time in every situation That would be extremely demanding and a very very hard thing to do And similarly on the honesty side, maybe the expectations you should never tell a lie. You should never cheat. You should never steal
PJ (23:21.954)
Yeah.
Christian Miller (23:41.792)
That's also very very hard to do and so some people might you know slip up a little bit some people I slip up a little bit more some people might slip up a little bit more so I let my picture that I have here is a Virtue is not all or nothing The stoics had this conception. I don't like it at all So either you're perfectly virtuous or you're not virtuous at all. I think that's just just unhelpful framework So you can be compassionate
But not perfectly compassionate. can be honest, but not perfectly honest. So can be an honest person who once in a while tells a lie, but it doesn't undermine your honesty and get you out of the honesty category. Now, at some point, though, there is a threshold. And you can't just be like a rampant liar and still count as honest. So at some point, you cross the line, and it's just too much of a stretch to call this person honest anymore. So there's that thought. And then second thought, perseverance and so forth.
You're right. So for any virtue is not a one-off. It's not a short-term matter. If you're going to continue to be virtuous, you've got to have that kind of stability to your behavior and all the rest in the long run. And to help with that, you're certainly right to think other virtues, for any virtue, other virtues can come alongside that and be complimentary and strengthen a given virtue.
Where I may be has just a little bit hesitant is to say something like perseverance could have its own work to do though I mean may not just be supplemental. It may not be just supportive, you know when it comes to things like finishing a project You know Tackling a big school project or a big construction project or you know, just a personal hobby or something like that. We might say
PJ (25:34.488)
Hmm.
Christian Miller (25:35.52)
you know, honesty might not come into play, compassion might not come into play in those kind of contexts, but perseverance could be this kind of central virtue, which is guiding the ship. And, you you don't give up, you you have obstacles that you face, you're maybe even tempted in the kind of darkest moments to say, you know, throw it out the window and I'm done with this. But, you know, you persevere. And at the end of the day, you make it and you kind of cross the finish line. So that's my one kind of...
PJ (26:03.436)
Yeah.
Christian Miller (26:03.905)
out there that it has its own work to do in its own right.
PJ (26:09.454)
I'm just trying to think through what you're saying here. I was a little confused when you were talking about the threshold I'm trying to understand what the purpose of the threshold is I can understand it if you're Classifying and you're studying but it seems your end goal is the formation and fruition of the virtue and it seems And this is very amateur folk psychology, but if I told my kids like
Christian Miller (26:28.01)
Yes, yes, yes.
Christian Miller (26:33.664)
Yeah.
PJ (26:38.114)
Hey, you can be considered an honest person if you pass this threshold. The immediate response is, hey, okay, so how many times can I lie and still be considered an honest person, right? Whereas like if your focus is on the formation and fruition, wouldn't it just be, hey, this is what honesty looks like, you just need to follow this. And don't worry about if you're hitting the threshold.
Christian Miller (26:49.28)
Right.
Christian Miller (27:01.226)
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
PJ (27:06.852)
Does that make sense? I'm trying to understand what's purpose of the threshold then.
Christian Miller (27:08.032)
Thanks for the instance. You nailed it. You already said what the purpose is. For me, it's primarily just a matter of classification. So, you know, that's the more empirical side coming out. So what we think like we look at these studies and they tell us all this stuff about people's behavior. And I want to of synthesize that data and use it to classify people's character in general. You know, I'm wondering, are most people honest? Are they in that category, even though comes in degrees?
PJ (27:15.158)
Okay, okay.
PJ (27:19.393)
Yes, gotcha.
Christian Miller (27:36.544)
Are most people dishonest or are they in that category? Or is there a middle space? And I think there is a middle space between honesty and dishonesty. And are most people there? And so, it's for purposes of classification and evaluation. And then, you know, maybe it can also be helpful for self-knowledge. Because lots of people, and this theme doesn't come out in this book, but in my earlier work, people tend to have a very high opinion of their own character.
PJ (27:59.533)
Yeah, yeah.
Christian Miller (28:06.816)
which I think doesn't act the truth. doesn't kind of correspond to the facts. And maybe in some cases, like in your case, I'm sure, you high opinion of your own character and it's justified, it's warranted, but in many cases... I'll just say that for you. So it's okay if I say it. But people often rate themselves a four out of five on virtue.
PJ (28:07.068)
Ha ha!
PJ (28:16.206)
I don't feel like I can answer that. feel like I'm going to be dishonest.
PJ (28:26.914)
Yeah, there you go.
Christian Miller (28:33.674)
Whereas I tend to think it's more like a two out of five or three out of five. And so, you know, and so I don't think they get to count as, as meeting the threshold, but, but your point, your focus was on improvements and formation and aspiration and all these kinds of things. And there I'm completely on board with you. Is it, know, for me at the end of the day, it matters. What matters most is getting better, becoming a better person. And that's going to be relative to where you start. The only place you can, you know,
peg yourself against is where you actually are here. So if you're virtuous already, there's still room for information. If you're mediocre, there's still room for information. If you're vicious, there's still room for information. Wherever you're starting, the point is to get off of that peg, move off that peg, and get better and better and better to try and do what you can or maybe with the assistance of others, religious or secular, to better approximate that standard of virtue.
to help close the character gap between whatever your character actually is and a character that you should have. That's the ultimate goal of all this work, is character improvement. And whether you meet the threshold or not, I don't really care as long as you're making progress. And I'm making progress.
PJ (29:54.828)
Yeah, so that's really helpful. Thank you. So the classification is good, obviously, for the study. So some of this depends on context, but also there's the self-knowledge part. But it's very important as we approach this pedagogically to make sure that people don't focus on, all right, I've saved up three lives this month and I'm going to use them well, right? Like that's...
Christian Miller (30:14.548)
Yeah. No, that may be already a mark that you're not there yet.
PJ (30:22.398)
Yes, yeah, shows that the mind is not there, the motivation is not there. Yes, yes. So you're dishonest about your honesty. I mean, this is why the human sciences, you know, like they're very difficult.
Christian Miller (30:25.994)
Yeah, yeah. That was really good. good. yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so the...
Christian Miller (30:36.256)
You can be you can be just honest about your honesty. That's for sure You can be an honesty researcher who's dishonest in doing honesty research That's also possible There are all kinds of layers to this that that get kind of amusing to some way but also sad in other ways, too
PJ (30:46.178)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ (30:55.694)
So I did want to ask you from the empirical side of things, being respectful of your time, what did you find was the most surprising result to you personally as you looked at the empirical psychology?
Christian Miller (31:11.232)
So there are lots of different ones. So let's focus on honesty specifically, because there are many other surprising results in other areas of morality and character. But honestly, specifically, I guess...
PJ (31:21.582)
of course.
Christian Miller (31:28.874)
So let me tell you what the kind of picture that emerged was and to give you a kind of specific study that illustrates maybe some of the surprising side of it. So let's just start with a study to make it more relatable. So there's one study in mind that I often talk about is one that's relatable for me because it has to do with students taking a test and I'm a professor and so I...
I'm giving a final exam tomorrow and so I'm always thinking about cheating in the context of the academic world and student dishonesty. So in this particular study, the control participants, so that's just like the baseline, they would come in, take a test, 20 problems, they were told they'd be paid 50 cents per correct answer that they got. They took the test, they turned it in, it was graded for them and they got paid based on their performance. And the baseline and the one I'm gonna think about at the moment,
Seven out of twenty correct the second group They came in took the same test, but they were told that they would be responsible for grading it themselves they would be able to dispose of their materials and just verbally report whatever they did on their test and So they had license to cheat if they want to they were not required to of course They could be honest as as far as their performance was concerned But they had complete license to cheat in a way that's undetected and be paid more as a result if they did cheat
And lo and behold, in this group, the performance in quotation marks performance was 14 out of 20. So 7 out of 20, the objective baseline, and then 14 out of 20 in this group. that in and of itself is surprising. And it's surprising in a couple of ways. Maybe not so surprising that they cheated. That's more like depressing. But surprising that if they were willing to cheat, they didn't go all the way.
PJ (33:01.623)
Hahaha!
Christian Miller (33:24.4)
So they may, mean, they're looking, if you're already on on board with cheating and you know, you can get away with it. Why would you just say 20 and just get paid more? So that's that I'll make that a surprising fact about that group. A third group. Now, different study, but same setup. They took the test. They were told that they would grade it themselves. So so so far, similar to the second group, but.
In this case before they took the test they had to sign their schools honor code And so not everyone I know is familiar with the honor system. So in this case there was a pledge That they had to sign that they would you know, not Ineffectively not in effect not cheat on the test and this was a university wide policy that they were already queued into they they signed it then they took the test remember this is not a real test this is not a
an actual like graded assignment in a professor's course. This is just for an experiment. And so you might think, look, if they're dishonest, they would just go through the formality of signing the honor code and then take the test and then report 14 out of 20 once again and get paid. They didn't. This group, the performance reported was back down to the control level. So it looked like cheating was negated here by the honor code.
So that was surprising to me also. you know, I would have thought if people were willing to cheat in the second group, they would be willing to cheat in the third group. But they weren't. And so what we have here, this fits into my picture of character with respect to honesty more generally. My picture is a mixed bag picture. It's a picture where most of us are not honest. Why is that represented in the study? Well, again, the second group has not honest behavior.
But at the same time, most of us are not dishonest either. Why in this study? Well, if most people were dishonest, they would have just gone through the formality of signing the honor code and then cheated anyway. But what we get is some good and some bad. Hence my mixed bag or what I call mixed character approach to thinking about these matters. Now, of course, there's gonna be individual differences. There'll be some people who are highly honest, some people who are highly dishonest. So you expect a spectrum here.
Christian Miller (35:46.964)
For most of us, think we're in this murky middle of neither great nor bad. And so that maybe that might not be surprising either, but I thought some of these findings, I wouldn't have expected. And so to run out the story, what's going on here? What explains this? Why are people behaving this way? And the story that in my mind is convincingly emerged from this data goes something like this.
We want to cheat if we think we can get away with it. And then lie would apply to lying and stealing and other things too. If we think we can get away with it and it would be rewarding, we want to do that kind of thing. Hence, people did that in the second group. They cheated on the test when they thought they could get away with it and get rewarded. But we also believe that cheating is wrong. And we also, side by side with all that, wanna think of ourselves as honest people.
We want other people to think of us as honest people. So to say that again, this is part of the mixed bag. We want to cheat if we think we can get away with it. This wouldn't apply just to tests. It would apply in other contexts too. Financial cheating, spousal cheating and other things like this. At the same time, we do really think that cheating is wrong. That's an aberable feature of our psychology. And we also want to think of ourselves as good people.
including as honest people. I want others, I want you to think of me as an honest person. I want other people, my peers to think of me as an honest person. Now, although we want to cheat, we also have that be checked and reined in by our feelings, the importance of being thinking of ourselves as good people, and our belief that cheating is wrong. So what ends up happening is that we're willing to cut corners a bit,
We're willing to cheat to some extent, so long as it doesn't compromise how we think of ourselves too much. Maybe to some extent a bit, but not too much. So we can go ahead with our lives, think of ourselves still as honest people. Maybe we cut a few corners here and there, but nothing big. But at the same time, deep down, we also like to cheat if we think we can get away with it.
PJ (37:54.602)
Hahaha
PJ (38:00.398)
Okay.
Christian Miller (38:14.88)
That was more than you asked for, not just surprising results, but an overall picture of what our character looks like, which is, I think, very mixed bag.
PJ (38:18.508)
No, it's great answer. Yeah.
PJ (38:29.37)
I think this is going far afield, but I'm immediately struck by things that I've either heard on here or read in general about
how our body responds to our own psychology. so like, I think most people understand that people develop tells around their dishonesty and there's a, there are physical reactions you have to consistently being dishonest. So there's a biological component to this, a biological health component that I think we're aware of. And so it's kind of, it feels almost like there is a certain substance abuse.
kind of thing to this where it's like, well, I can have like one drink, right? Or I can have, that's okay. But I really shouldn't have four drinks. know, some people are like, I'll have four drinks. got a weekend, but not. so there's, there's that kind of awareness. There's also this communal awareness, where if I can get away with it, then I don't, it won't impact me long-term in my community, but there's a, there's a real, like, I mean, you mentioned this with the motivation sit.
Christian Miller (39:19.05)
Yeah, that's That's good.
PJ (39:41.366)
standpoint, if we're only being honest, that's just so that other people perceive us as honest. There's a real value to that for that person. And we recognize that as not being honest. I just said honest a lot there. but but so there's there's there's these there's this huge
impact so many different areas of our lives and so many different areas of study, especially when you bring out this empirical side of it. Do you have any thoughts about that? Am I on the right track?
Christian Miller (40:15.486)
Yep. Yes, yeah, yeah, you are. Let's start with the biological. Yes, with the exception perhaps of psychopaths. So it's not going to generalize in every case, with some kind of rare exceptions, there's at a biological level some kind of impacts associated with dishonesty and lying being the main example of that. Now, as far as tells, though, it does automatically translate into
PJ (40:25.025)
Right.
Christian Miller (40:45.472)
tells that are inner personally perceptible. In other words, when you lie, you might internally like your stress level might go up or your heartbeat might increase or something like that, but it might not be discernible to other people. In fact, there's this really interesting kind of body of empirical work on dishonesty perception and how good we are at telling whether people are being dishonest with us. And as a matter of fact, we're not very good at it.
PJ (41:15.31)
I think I've seen some of those studies.
Christian Miller (41:15.648)
And so we're basically no better than 50-50 on this than chance guessing. So the lesson to learn from that is don't be overconfident in your ability to read people and tell them whether they're being honest or dishonest with you. So that's, I think, quite interesting research. Now, on the broader points you were making about
Does it how does this factor into motivation to be honest and so forth and there are these impacts or it could be like dishonest impacts on my health? dishonest impacts on my computer community There can be dishonest impacts come from a religious perspective as well So all that is right to me And it's you know, it's very hard to navigate your life being dishonest and getting away with it and not having anyone find out about that that you're doing that and
And always have to worry about that and stress about that. Am I you know covering my bases well enough I said this lie so I need to make sure that I My next story is consistent with my previous line my next stories because my previous lie and that the story doesn't Tell give it away. That's all that's all right to me. So those are kind of self-interested reasons not to be dishonest Because in the long term it could make your life worse even if in the short term you get some kind of momentary advantage you get the
you like the extra payment on the test because you cheated. I mean, if you consider to have this kind of pattern of behavior, you might suffer in the long run. All that seems to be right. However, you nicely caveated that by saying that can't be your primary motivation to be honest. You can't if you want to be a virtuously honest person. So it can't be the virtuous honest person isn't telling the truth.
because they're worried about being punished by society for lying, or they're worried about what it'll do to their biology in the long run. Why not? Because that's all self-interested. That just makes true telling and honesty in general a matter of, it's good for me, therefore I'm gonna do it. That it is good for you, but as a byproduct or side effect of being honest.
Christian Miller (43:39.858)
If it's the goal, if it's the motivation, if it's the reason why you're being honest to benefit yourself, then that undercuts the possibility of becoming virtuous. This is a point that generalizes for all virtues, it's not specific to honesty. All virtues are incompatible, I think, with self-interested motivation. If your primary motive is, I'm doing it because it helps me, I don't think you can be compassionate, I don't think you can be honest, and then go down the list of the virtues.
However, if you're doing it for some other reason and your secondary motivation, if you have more than one motivation, your secondary motivation is self-interested, or you're doing it for some other reason and as a byproduct or side effect, you benefit. That's fine. I don't want to be too harsh about the matter, but it can't just be a matter of what's in it for me. You have to look either to two things, either what's good for the other person,
That's altruistic, what benefits the other person or what's the right thing to do. So is this required? Is this what God's law says or is this what the moral law says or whatever, wherever you take your moral standards to come from? Is that what is expected of me? And is that what motivates me? Then those sources of motivation, I think we'd have discussion about that, but those would be OK in the case of honesty. You're doing it just like
I don't want to die early, I don't want to get punished, I don't want to go to jail, or I don't want to get punished, know, go to hell or something like that. Any kind of ways of cashing out the self-interest, that's not going to cut it for virtue.
PJ (45:21.486)
So, Juan, thank you so much for coming on today. Besides reading your excellent book and then looking out for your popular version of this if someone wants to read a less academic account, what would you recommend to someone who has listened to this today? You kind of have some recommendations at the end, some strategies that you think would be good to pursue being a more honest person. To end today, what would you recommend to our audience?
after listening to this.
Christian Miller (45:51.584)
Yeah, there's There's what I can recommend as far as reading is concerned and there's what I can recommend in just a few minutes here As far as reading is concerned I have another book. So I self-interested at the end of the day. So Can't avoid it, but I don't claim to be virtuous either so And then I started doing well self-interested promotion, but I have another book here called the character gap
PJ (46:07.97)
There you go, there you go.
Haha
PJ (46:18.666)
Mm-hmm
Christian Miller (46:21.14)
And this is a short, popular level, meant to be really accessible discussion of character with a lot of material on character improvements and how to grow in virtue and become a better person. But just some parting thoughts here as tailored specifically to honesty, I'll mention two of many strategies you could adopt. Two strategies, one is having honest exemplars in your life.
kind of role models and people you can look up to for inspiration. So these could be like, you know, family members, they could be friends, they could be community members, they could be, you know, if there are any like in the public sphere these days, celebrities and so forth, they're honest. They could be historical though. You could go to religious figures, you could go to Abraham Lincoln, know, this Dave is known for his honesty. They could even be fictional exemplars. The point being, these are people
who you admire for their honesty, and because of your admiration, they inspire you to become more honest yourself. So it's not just academic, this person's really, really honest. No, it hits you at an emotional level. I'm really inspired by this person to become more honest myself. And then the extent to which you have those people around you can counterbalance to some extent dishonest pressures from those people around you.
You know, in a school context where there's widespread cheating by peers, that's a huge influence or impact on a given student's motivation to cheat. So try to push back against peer pressure to cheat or lie or steal. The other strategy I'll mention briefly is having honesty reminders in your life. So,
Although we kind of know it at an abstract level, it's important to be honest and it's bad to cheat and lie and steal. We can forget that in the moment. We can kind of get caught up again in self-interest, you know, what would benefit me, what is, you know, this post on social media make me look better, even if it kind of distorts things or embellishes things a bit, it would kind of increase my number of followers or enhance my reputation as a concrete illustration. And so having honesty reminders can help
Christian Miller (48:42.964)
bring back to our conscious awareness what I think we do believe, which is that honesty is important. And the importance of being able think of ourselves as honest people. And these honesty reminders can take a variety of forms. They could take things you read about, the daily reading that you have. They could take the forms of emails or text messages that you get every day as a daily reminder. could, know, journaling is another approach that people adopt.
PJ (48:49.038)
Mm.
Christian Miller (49:11.284)
The honor, in my kind of context, the honor code, which we mentioned already, is a very important honesty reminder, which I impose, but also try and get my students to personally embrace, every test on every paper that we together are in this academic endeavor collectively, and you're pledging your honor, and I'm pledging my honor, as we embark on these assessments.
And so that's a kind of honesty reminder right before tests or when writing a paper that I'm holding them to the standards. I want them to hold themselves to the standards too. So summing up two strategies amongst many exemplars or role models and honesty reminders.
PJ (49:58.188)
Great answer. Dr. Miller, it's been an absolute joy talking to you today. Thank you so much.
Christian Miller (50:03.274)
Great to be with you. Thanks so much for our conversation.