What a fascinating thing in the Theranos documentary
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I'm watching a Theranos documentary. It's called "The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley". I've discussed sociopath Elizabeth Holmes here before.
Near mid-way, a guy named Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist, described an experiment he did. He asked people to roll a six sided die, but before they rolled, they also had to decide whether they wanted to take the face-side, or the opposite side. (They always sum to seven.) The participants were not to tell anybody what side they chose. They would be paid money based on the number they got, after the flip, or not, based on what side they chose. So if they rolled a one, but chose a priori to flip the die, they'd get a six. If they rolled a four, but chose to flip, they'd get a three. But they could always lie, after seeing what they rolled.
The twist was that he hooked them up to a lie detector test, which he determined to be mostly accurate, when the subjects thought they were rolling for themselves. But then he had another group of subjects who he told were rolling for a charity. Not themselves. The lie detector stopped working. When people started lying in the service of what they perceived to be the greater good, they stopped receiving signals from their body that they were doing bad. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is my thesis. Thank you very much for listening.
