The ability of LLMs and other AI agents to quickly and easily generate both media and personas has flooded the internet with fabricated content, plunging our concept of honesty into a brave new era. Education, in particular, is reeling from AI’s effects – now that it’s so easy to offload cognitive labor, how do we ensure that students still learn and develop honesty as a character virtue?
Professor Christian B. Miller, as A.C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University, has approached this topic from many angles using the analytical tools of his home discipline. From 2018 to 2023, he was the director of the Honesty Project, which was funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation and examined the virtue of honesty from the perspectives of philosophy and empirical study. He has written multiple books on this and other character virtues, including The Character Gap: How Good Are We?, Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue, and his latest, The Honesty Crisis: Preserving Our Most Treasured Virtue in an Increasingly Dishonest World, out this week from Oxford University Press.
Geoff Mitelman: Hello, and welcome, as we get to talk with one of my friends and colleagues, Professor Christian Miller, who spoke to our group as part of Jewish Thought and Jewish Education for the Digital Future. Christian has spoken with us with Sinai and Synapses a couple times before, and he has a new book out called The Honesty Crisis, which is something that we are thinking about over the last few years with the rise of LLMs, with the rise of AI, but also over the last decades as the political discourse has changed over the last millennia as we think about the ways in which honesty and speech impact our society.
Right now, we’re moving into the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, which is the celebration of the giving of the Torah – and particularly the Aseret Hadibrot, the Ten Commandments, one of which talks about not bearing false witness, which I think is probably a little bit more nuanced than just what honesty is. But this is a broad discussion of what honesty is, why this is important, how we inculcate it – so I’m really excited, Christian, to talk to you here about your new book.
Christian Miller: It’s great to see you. Looking forward to it, thanks for having me back, and let’s get right to it.
Geoff Mitelman: Let’s absolutely get right to it, because I think one of the things we need to think about at the beginning is: What exactly is honesty, and why is that important in the first place?
What is Honesty?
Christian Miller: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m a philosopher – I like to start there. I want to be clear about what I mean, and make sure we’re all on the same page.
So, let me bypass an easy answer. An easy answer would be just to say, “Honesty is telling the truth, deceit is lying, and we’re done.” And you know, there’s something to that, of course, our cultural icons are associated with truth-telling – Pinocchio is associated with lying. But it’s much more rich, much more nuanced, much more… complicated than that. So, honesty, I’m thinking of as a virtue, as a character trait, as part of who we are as a moral person, makes us better, morally speaking. It has an outward component, behaviorally; it has an internal component, motivationally. It has a cross-situational aspect or dimension to it. What does that mean? An honest person is honest in the courtroom, on the podcast, at the office, in their home life, in their religious life – so, consistently across situations, stably over time, one week, next week, next week. It’s not just that they take a day off, or they take a week off. So there are those components to it.
Christian Miller: Let’s pause and unpack both the behavior a little bit more, and then the motivation. So, on the behavior side, yeah, truth-telling is important. But honesty also prevents things like cheating, stealing, fraud, BSing, hypocrisy, self-deception, misleading… it covers a lot of moral territory. So, in fact, maybe more than any other virtue out there, it prevents lots of different ways of acting badly.
Yet, even that’s not enough, because you can act a certain way outwardly, and not qualify as virtuous, if your heart isn’t in the right place if your motives aren’t virtuous. So you could tell the truth to the boss, and, you know, you’re telling the truth, so no fault as far as the behavior is concerned. But you might be doing it just to try and angle for a promotion, or to get a new job, or to not get fired from your existing job, or to get rewards in the afterlife, or to not feel guilty – all these kind of are for impression management reasons to make yourself look good, virtue signalling, all these kinds of things. All that’s no good, in my view – no good as far as virtue is concerned. They’re all self-centered. They’re all about benefiting myself. And a virtuous motivation has to be other-directed, out of myself, looking, not just to benefit myself, but looking to something larger.
What might that be? Well, we could unpack this in quite some detail, but I’ll give the really brief version. It could be either I’m concerned with the good of another person so, I’m telling the truth because I care about the other person because I love the other person, because they’re my friend, because I want what’s good for them.” Or it could be because it’s the right thing to do – so, more abstract, dutiful, obligatory motivation.You know, “because I have an obligation to do it, because I’ve been commanded to do it, because it’s my moral duty to tell the truth.”
These kinds of reasons, whether in the abstract or the personal (but not my person, the other person) – these are perfectly fine. These are good motives for honesty, they’re virtuous. And so if you put all the pieces together, you got the motivation in the right place, you’ve got the behavior of the right kind – stable over time, consistent across situations. Now we have a much richer picture of what an honest person will look like.
Geoff Mitelman: So, I want to play something in, which is a question of trust and trustworthiness. In Judaism, for example, there’s a relationship of the word emet, which means “truth,” and emunah, which means, sort of, “trustworthiness.” And they’re linked, and they’re related, but there’s an aspect of not only saying the truth, but being a trustworthy person. So where does that come in, of honesty and truth and trustworthiness?
When Truth and Honesty Clash — On Stumbling Blocks and Honest Weights
Christian Miller: Sure, sure, sure. So, yeah, three pieces here. Let’s take them slowly, one at a time. So, honesty and trust clearly are related, but not the same thing – so they’re not interchangeable. But they are conceptually and also empirically linked. So, if you’re honest with someone that’s going to foster trust with that person, if you’re dishonest, and it’s discovered (of course, if it’s not discovered, that’s different), but if it’s discovered that you’re dishonest towards the other person, that’s going to break trust. The trust is founded upon the other person knowing and trusting that they’re getting you as you authentically are – they’re getting your authentic self, not some mask or performance, or, you know, curated version of you that’s different from who you really are.
Now, all this, though, doesn’t have to translate into Truth with a capital T – truth as an objective truth, truth as in the way reality really is. There’s an interesting thing about honesty, which is that honesty tracks subjective truth. It does not track automatically objective truth.
To make that less abstract, here’s an example I’d like to use. Five thousand years ago, if you asked people what the shape of the Earth is, they would say “the Earth is flat.” They’re being honest. They’re giving you an authentic, communication as to what they genuinely believe. And of course, they’re mistaken.
So you could have honesty, and you could have trust, and that kind of situation, without the actual truth. And you can have the actual truth without honesty and trust. So, to illustrate that, you might have someone today, who is a member of the Flat Earth Society, which is a real thing. But, of course, it’s costly to be a member of the Flat Earth Society, and they might not want that to be well-known. So they might be asked, “What is the shape of the Earth?” And they say, “Oh, the Earth is round, everyone knows that.” Well, they’re saying something that’s true, but they’re not being honest, and they’re not – if it’s discovered, they’re going to, you know, break trust, because they’re not authentically reporting what they really do believe. So those are some ideas about how those concepts relate.
Geoff Mitelman: You know, there’s a verse in Leviticus – in the holiness code, in Kedoshim, in Leviticus 19, where there’s a line that says, “You shall not put a stumbling block before the blind” – which, on some level, like, don’t be a cruel jerk and do that. But the rabbis take that to mean “don’t mislead somebody,” that if somebody is blind to other information…
There’s another part that says, like, having honest weights and measures as well. So, a lot of what you’re talking about is not necessarily finding objective “scientific” truth, but more building a social truth that’s there.
Christian Miller: Good, good. So, a couple of comments and reactions. Although, note that on this perspective about honesty – it’s compatible with being an honest person that you are radically mistaken about the facts, whether scientific or otherwise – you could be raised in a very isolated way, and be wholly ignorant of many things that ordinary people are aware of, and yet still be an honest person, because when asked, you know, “What do you think about this, what do you think about this, what do you think about this,” you tell the truth as you see it, even though that’s not the truth, as it really is.
Second reaction: “misleading” is an interesting category, because misleading adds a kind of nuance to how we think about truth. And dishonesty, if you mislead someone – and we’re careful, we’re talking about misleading as opposed to lying, as opposed to BSing – I suppose these other things, what you’re doing is actually telling them something true as you see it.
So, you’re not lying – you’re telling the truth, as you see it, but in a curated way, to try and get them to draw a false conclusion. So, an illustration of that is: you’re married, the next day after a night out, your wife asks you, “What were you doing last night?” and you say, “Oh, I was at the bar with the guys.”
Now, that is true. And you believe that’s true. You were with the guys last night. You just left out a crucial word, on purpose: “only.” So, you’re saying something’s true, but you’re hoping that your wife will draw the false implication that that’s the only place you were last night – whereas, in fact, you went to the bar, but also went somewhere else afterwards – so, up to no good.
So, “misleading” is an interesting category because you are speaking the truth, but in a curated way, with the hope, with the intention, with the aim, of getting the person to draw a false conclusion. That is also dishonest. And so we need to be mindful of that, and not do that if we really want to be honest people.
Honesty, Trust and Media
Geoff Mitelman: I want to play off a little what you’re talking about, because one thing that we’ve been thinking about with Sinai and Synapses is the role of AI and technology. And you use the word “speaking,” and I think one of the things that has become very interesting and challenging in our world right now, which is the movement from speech, to written language, to video, to moving in this – people talk about a post-literate society right now.
One of the things about honesty – to me, I feel that honesty is something that is generally much more interpersonal and spoken, more than written text. I think written text – there’s a lot of interpretation, whether that’s legal, whether that’s moral, whether that’s religious. When I think of honesty, I think of that more as something that is spoken, because written text, you can look back and say, “Ah, you used that word ‘only,’” and you can parse that.
I’m thinking both in terms of the role that technology plays in religion of written text that’s there, and what exists in our digital society and AI-generated society?
Christian Miller: So I think you’re right, that that’s where our mind goes first when it comes to honesty. We think of interpersonal verbal communication as very natural. That also is connected to the idea of lying being the kind of first thing we think of as oppositional to honesty.
Having said that, I am very intentional in not limiting or fencing in honesty just to interpersonal verbal communication. I think it can manifest in lots of other ways. So, there’s communication with myself. So it doesn’t have to be interpersonal; it could be intrapersonal. I can fail to be honest if I deceive myself.
So there’s that. I also think that there can be acts like a car dealer, a used-car salesman, [painting] over a rusty spot on a used car to hide it when trying to make a sale. That’s something dishonest. There’s no verbal communication there. The written case, I also think, honestly, comes into play. But again, I’m agreeing with you that it’s not where our minds go to first.
So, here’s one way: plagiarism. So, if I write an article, and in that article, I take ideas from someone else and their publications, and I incorporate them into my article – but I don’t cite them, I don’t give them credit as the source of those ideas – I take credit for it myself, [and] I publish my article, then I am engaging in plagiarism. Plagiarism is a form of dishonesty. It’s also wrong.
Now, all this gets, I think, accelerated. And this takes us to the honesty crisis – when we introduce technology, because technology is just going to magnify these effects, sometimes exponentially.
So, we can go in a variety of different directions, like student AI cheating. There, that’s going to be written, typically, using AI, doing something dishonest as a form of cheating. But you alluded to things like videos, and audio, so maybe we’ll start there.
So, deepfakes are another thing I talk about in the book. And what’s going on here is,, someone’s creating, using AI – let’s say, a deepfake audio, a voice that sounds just like a real person’s voice. I’m thinking of an example that happened in the last political election. [A recording of] Biden’s voice was AI-generated, during the primaries, to sound just like Biden’s actual voice. It was used for a robo-call for voters, Democratic primary voters, and the voice said, “Don’t bother showing up for the primary, we don’t need you now, we need you in the general election.”
So, I think, the creation and distribution of that audio deepfake was dishonest. It was misrepresenting, intentionally, the actual facts, because Biden never said that. You never said those words – they were artificial.
Same thing happens with these videos. The most, prevalent or most common form of these videos are non-consensual deepfake – pornographic videos, I won’t go into the details of what those look like, but, you know, you take… a celebrity’s face, typically a woman, and transpose it onto a pornography actress’s body, doing the usual pornographic stuff. And then these days, with the technology, it looks so realistic, it looks as if it was actually that actress doing that thing. And there are thousands of these videos out there now. They are non-consensual, they are pornographic, they are deepfakes, they’re AI-generated, and they’re dishonest – because, after all, this person never made that. They’re dishonest in multiple ways. They never consented to making them, they never were actually in those positions, they never were with that other person, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So, it turns out, then, that deepfake videos are also dishonest as well.
Consent, Distrust, and Mistrust — Is it Lashon Hara?
Rabbi Geoff Mitelman: It’s making me think of a line in the Talmud that says that – they talk about lashon hara, which is the Hebrew word that literally means “the evil tongue.” It’s often described as gossip, but I think it’s a little bit more than that, because people say, “You can say lashon hara, even if it’s true.” There’s an evil… and so there’s a [saying] that lashon hara kills three people – that it kills the person who says it, the person about whom it is said, and the person who hears it. And the rabbis say that actually the person who gets it the worst is actually the person who hears it, because once you hear something, our brains are such that we assume that something is true, and it becomes harder to be able to move away from that basic statement, which, I think, is both now, orally and visually as well.
And I think the question of… of non-consent, that’s a huge part of this. Yes, there are elements of pornography, but there’s also the broader conversations of manipulation. There was one a couple of years ago where there was an AI-generated video in response to Kanye West’s anti-Semitic ad on the Super Bowl, and they created videos there that nobody agreed to. And I think that’s become a huge challenge as well.
But when you hear something – we evolved to be able to just sort of believe people. And so, how do we live in a world where we always have to have our skepticism radar, but that’s also exhausting…
Christian Miller: It is.
Geoff Mitelman: …and it’s also hard for our society to always be saying, “No, I can’t trust that anymore.”
Christian Miller: Yep, yep, yep. So, I’m going to reaffirm what you said, in that, in Chapter 2 of the book, I talk about some empirical research online. And what emerges from that research is not a kind of really pessimistic story that we lie all the time. It’s a story where we’re both truth-default speakers, and also truth-biased in what we hear. And then I’ll take it more directly to your question.
So, the emerging theory here in communications research and psychological research is that we default to telling the truth to others. It was called “truth-to-fault theory.” That’s our natural tendency. And we’re also truth-biased – so, our default is to assume that other people are telling us the truth, or that our communication that we receive from others is honest. And, you know, building on what you said, it takes resources – psychological resources – to overcome that default tendency. So that’s a costly thing to have to do that.
Now, are we getting closer and closer to having to do that, because of things like deepfake videos and audio? I don’t think we’re there yet. I think it’s still reasonable a lot of the time, when we go online, to trust the validity and honesty of what we’re seeing and what we’re hearing. But there’s no doubt that it’s less trustworthy than it was before AI, and that every year that goes by, it’s becoming less and less trustworthy as well.
So, I think we could imagine a future where, because we’ve been let down so many times, and betrayed so many times by what we’re seeing, we are now skeptical. Our default stance becomes one of skepticism; it’s not, “Oh yeah, that’s fake,” it’s, “We don’t know.” Those are totally different stances. “It may be fake, it may be real. I can’t tell anymore. So I can’t, default, trust us anymore.” And so that, that is going to have pernicious consequences.
Take things like criminal trials. Audio and video evidence is extremely powerful in criminal prosecution. Can we trust it anymore? So, when we lose that ability to trust these things, it becomes unclear what information sources we are going to be able to rely on. And how are we, therefore, going to be fostering even greater ignorance, losing a lot of our cultural heritage in the process, because we can no longer naturally trust these forms of communication? That has me worried, for sure.
Are the Interpersonal and the Intimate the Only Antidotes to AI Cheating?
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah. I think we also have questions with the rise of LLMs. And one of the things that’s interesting is – I’ve started to teach this a little bit, where I ask people, “Which is more intimate [and I mean this just sort of a social intimate], having a face-to-face conversation, with a person, or texting back and forth?” And everyone always says, “Of course, talking face-to-face.”
I say, “Great. Which feels more intimate to you: Texting back and forth with an LLM, or texting back and forth with a video that’s there?” And everybody always says, “Going back and forth with an LLM.” Like, people feel more connected because an LLM is more personal, and there’s a back-and-forth. A video is a one-to-many; an LLM is an interpersonal element.
And so, there are the deepfake videos that’s almost designed to be propaganda, I think, in a lot of ways. An LLM is not trying to be deceptive. It’s not trying to be propaganda. And often, it’s relatively accurate, but it does hallucinate, it does, raise questions of, “Is this accurate or not?” I mean, we all talk about… someone said, “I started talking in Claude-speak with my wife, where my wife will say, ‘Did you empty the dishwasher?’ ‘Yes, I did.’ ‘Well, why are they still dirty?’ ‘I’m glad you brought that up. Thank you for calling me out, I was not being accurate there and honest.’” Like, because that’s how these LLMs [talk], like, they will say, “Here’s what’s happening,” and then push it, and it’s not honest.
Christian Miller: (Laughs)
Geoff Mitelman: So where does that come into education – coming into relationships there, as well?
Christian Miller: It’s easier for me to head in the direction of education, since I’m a professor. I teach at Wake Forest, and have to deal with this issue on a constant basis. In my classes, I’m thinking about – you know, I have to assess my students with grade assessments. I can do things in class, but as a philosophy professor, for decades, I’ve been giving them papers to write at home and then turn in. Other professors will have problem sets. Other professors will have coding assignments. We’re all, you know, kind of default used to giving at-home grade assessments.
Well, the students now are default AI communicators, like you just talked about. Starting in high school, they were using this every day. They’re quite comfortable bringing an assessment from a professor to the AI, and having the AI help them do it (or do it entirely for them) and then turn in the work. Mostly, professors will not condone this. But if a professor does condone it, and says, “That’s fine” – okay, well then, there’s no question of honesty here. They’re just doing what the professor allows – they turn it in, they get their grade, we’re all fine. Well, at least as far as honesty is concerned, I think – maybe in other respects, we’re not fine. But the majority of professors are not going to be happy with this. The majority of professors wants the thinking – and the reasoning, and the consideration, and the reflection, and all the other things that come with the assessment – to be done by the actual students. And it’s sad that the student’s offloading it onto this other tool, this device, that’s doing it for them and then turning it in – often getting a better grade than they would have gotten otherwise.
So what I make of this is: If the professor expects the student to do the work, if the student doesn’t do the work, has the AI do it for them, and turns it in without acknowledging the contribution of the AI – then that is plagiarism. This is not the traditional form of plagiarism, but it is a form of plagiarism. You’re taking credit for someone or something else’s work, and putting it forward as if it were your own. So you’re misrepresenting, on purpose, who’s doing the work, without acknowledging the source and giving credit to the source. Now, plagiarism is as dishonest, as, I think, morally wrong. Now, that’s the kind of doom-and-gloom version of it, but it’s just descriptively accurate. That’s what’s happening today.
What do you do about it? Well, there are the optimists, and then there are the pessimists here. The pessimists are going to be me, and the optimists are going to say, “Well, maybe there’s a way to incentivize the students not to use this. Maybe there’s a way to…” you know, the honor code could be effective, and reining in their temptation to use it. Or maybe we have harsher penalties, to incentivize, [in] a negative direction, them not doing it.
We could talk about all that. I think those ideas were good in the earlier years, in the past, when we didn’t have technology at all like this, or even when we had the internet, and we had Google – even then, I think some of these techniques were effective. But now I think it’s hopeless. Sadly, but I don’t see any way around it. The technology is so easy to use. It’s either free or very cheap. It’s lightning-fast. If you’re skilled at using it, it’s going to deliver an output that’s better than what you would have written yourself. And, as of now, it’s largely undetectable, at least at a bar that would be needed for prosecution by the university.
So, when you throw in all those elements together – you know, I would love it if students had a better character that they could resist all that. But, heck, I mean, we’re human beings. We’re not virtuous, for the most part. That’s a lot to ask of students to pull back from a resource like that.
And so, as a pessimist, I think the only thing to do moving forward is to take the AI out of the students’ hands – take it away from them. And how do you do that? Well, you have all of your grade assessments done in class, where you can regulate what they do, and they can’t use AI.
When and Why We Cognitively Offload
Geoff Mitelman: And as you’re bringing up these questions of putting it on us to be able to act, or the students to be able to act – one of the values of religion and rules is being able to sort of cognitively offload, potentially – which we look down on; we don’t want AI to be doing our cognitive offload. But sometimes, being able to say, “This is how we act in this world,” of, like, “You don’t have to make this decision each [time]”… I mean, in our society, everyone makes their own decisions. For those of us who are living in North America and the West, there is a level of individualism, but as we’re moving into Shavuot, which is a holiday that talks about the giving of the Torah, of rules, at least in Judaism – that this is not what Judaism says.
You know, in Judaism, there’s a joke. It says, “God so loved the world that He gave us His only Torah.”
Christian Miller: (Laughs)
Geoff Mitelman: That’s a play off of what Christians say, but the Torah is viewed as an expression of love, and in the same way in which a parent teaches children by saying what’s right and wrong, and “here’s how we act,” and helping them develop and grow as human beings, and not having to make each individual decision – that’s a lot of what Judaism and Shavuot and the Torah are about as well, that they’re designed to be able to guide who we are.
And actually, one of the things on Shavuot is the giving of the Ten Commandments. You know, there’s obviously a lot of discussion in our American society about the value of putting them up in public schools. I think it’s not a valuable piece to be able to put that there. And a lot of the rules themselves are not as valuable as other ones in the Torah.
But there’s a professor named Joel Hoffman who said that one of the things that is really unique about at least the Ten Commandments is that they don’t have a consequence. They are simply, “This is what you should do.” Every other rule, at least in anywhere – like, you know, if you’re working at Wake Forest, for example – there’s a [policy] like, “If you use an LLM, here is what’s going to happen. If you violate this policy, here’s what the consequence is.” Wake Forest is not just going to say, like, “Be a decent human being.” Like, there’s no way to regulate that.
And so, trying to have both the rules, but also what are the values – to be aspirational. And I wonder about honesty – that there’s something of being honest. There’s a value, there’s a consequence, if you’re not honest. And it’s also the being honest just for the fact of being honest.
Christian Miller: Right, good, good, yeah, there’s a lot there to unpack, and very, very rich.
So, I am a big supporter of morality, moral rules, moral principles, moral guidelines – you know, they’re helping us. I don’t think we offload our thinking onto them. Wherever they’re coming from, whether it’s the Ten Commandments or something else, they’re a very useful, helpful tool to have. But they don’t do our moral thinking for us. Each one has to be interpreted.
We also have to make sure we recognize when they apply and when they don’t. We also have to think about how to adjudicate conflicts between them. If they come into conflict between them, which one do I prioritize? So there’s a lot of value to this, but not in a way that makes me worry that we’re just, like, in the LLM case, we’re just kind of offloading our thinking onto something else that does it for us. Still, plenty of opportunity to virtually, make our own contribution.
Second thought: When it comes to the Ten Commandments specifically, interesting points – circling back to honesty, I think of at least three of them have to do with honesty. So there’s the false witness one, but one of them has to do with adultery, and one of them has to do with stealing. So here, I think, with my broad conception of honesty, I want to include under the tent of honesty: not stealing, not committing adultery, as well as not lying or, you know, misleading other people.
So, arguably, of any virtue that connects the Ten Commandments, honesty might do it the most – you know, at least as far as, like, on a crude numbers count here.
Third point: I never appreciated the idea about the consequences. I never thought about that before. So, there’s no, like, immediate threat of punishments associated with violating them, or immediate promise of reward associated with satisfying them. And I like that idea. I never appreciated that, and that also makes me feel better, from a virtue perspective, because a real danger, when it comes to moral principles – religious or not – is that we follow them, or we’re motivated to follow them, just on, again, self-interested grounds, because if I don’t, I’m going to get punished in some way, and if I do, I’m going to get rewarded, and it makes it all about me and my benefits and rewards. That’s not going to be virtuous. We have to move beyond that.
And then that dovetails with the last point, which was what you highlighted as far as “aspirational.” And I’m a big fan of exemplars, moral saints and heroes – people who are doing better than me and can be role models for me to follow. But I think the same point could translate over to what you’re talking about here. And these are aspirational principles to follow, too.
In both cases, whether it’s principles or persons, I can admire them, I can be inspired to follow them, because I recognize I’m not doing a great job. But I can be emotionally moved to change my life, to have it conform more to either the principles or the person. And that can then foster a process of character improvements and developments. I’m not virtuous myself, but I can work on myself – maybe with the help of my community – religious community, for example – and with the help of examples and principles, to try and nudge my character closer and closer to where it’s supposed to be, following these principles, living a life like this exemplar.
So, I think there’s a lot in what you said that resonated with me.
Building an Honest Society
Geoff Mitelman: And it’s a wonderful way to close this, of being able to think through – how do we build not just our individual deepening of honesty, but how do we build a society that values honesty? And I think that it’s becoming harder and harder to do that, and I think that’s not something that we can do purely as individuals. But how do we create a culture where this is something that is celebrated and valued?
So, I would love, as a last thought, of how do we create that culture of honesty in our world right now?
Christian Miller: Yeah. I wish I had a simple answer for that. I wish I had a magic formula, that would sell a lot more copies of my book, for example (laughs), but there is no such easy answer as everyone would expect me to say that there isn’t.
There are a few things we can say, though. I mean, we can say them at least in a general level, they have to be implemented constructively and concretely in real-world situations.
I mean, it would be nice, first of all, if people at the top – just piggybacking on what we were just talking about – were exemplifying this virtue. That would inspire everyone else in the society or culture or institution to follow. That has been found, time and time again, to have a kind of trickle-down effect on people in a group. If the leaders are doing it, that can inspire others to do it as well. Sadly, though, that’s going to be an obstacle in many contexts. I think politically, that’s going to be an obstacle. Sadly, many organizations today, the same thing – we see CEO scandal after CEO scandal after CEO scandal – so you can’t just rely on that.
Second thought is that you hope to find like-minded people in your organization, and at least be intentional about it with them in conversation such that you’re clear that this is what you care about, they also care about it, and you’re going to keep each other accountable together. It may just be a few people, but accountability groups can be quite impactful, because if left to our own devices, we will often rationalize; we’ll find ways to cut corners – “Oh, it’s not a big deal,” or, you know, “Who’s ever gonna find out? It’s not gonna hurt anyone.” But accountability partners can really keep us honest, and we keep them honest.
So that’s two things. And then the third thing would be, ethical reminders in the society, or the organization, or the group. So, some kind of tangible way to keep us on track and not get us distracted, or misled, or caught up in our own self-interest. So, you know, some places, like educational places, have actual signage on their walls, or they have an honor code.
They have, you know, a motto, like, for Wake Forest, it’s Pro Humanitate. But you know, it could be weekly reminders to the group over email, or a reading group, or a discussion group, or a lunch group, or this kind of thing – just keeping our perspective where it needs to be at, having that be habitual and regular and repeated, and not just a one-off. A one-off will fade; it needs to be sustained. So those are some initial ideas.
Geoff Mitelman: Yeah, and I think that’s the question, of how we build this society in groups – because honesty is both personal and interpersonal. So, Christian, thank you for taking some time to talk with us here today, and your book… get your book anywhere books are sold, The Honesty Crisis. And I hope that we are able to start building out a little bit more of a world of honesty. As we start to feel the walls closing in around us, how do we make sure that we keep our world structured and together?
So thank you, Christian.
Christian Miller: Yep. Thank you. That’s why I wrote the book, so I’d appreciate the opportunity to share some of the ideas. Great to see you.
Geoff Mitelman: Thank you so much.
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