The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant - Building Integrity in the Age of Normalized Cheating

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

What happens to integrity when cheating becomes easier and the world seems to reward people for cutting corners? In this episode of The Curiosity Shop, Adam shares what happened when he discovered that students were planning to use AI to cheat on an exam. Brené and Adam move into a much larger conversation about honesty, character, and moral identity. Together, they explore when using AI is inherently cheating, why monitoring people isn’t enough to make them trustworthy, the difference between shame and adaptive guilt, and what research reveals about building a stronger moral compass. They also unpack why honor codes can sometimes backfire, how inconsistent accountability undermines trust, and what dimension of character we often overlook. Ultimately, Brené and Adam explore the difference between wanting to be seen as a good person and choosing to become the kind of person who does the right thing even when no one else is watching. There’s Really Only One Way to Stop Students From Cheating – Adam Grant, August 26, 2026, The New York Times Cheating: Why Students Do It and How We Can Help Them Stop – Donald McCabe, 2001, American Educator Brené Brown: The Rage Bucket Theory – Trevor Noah, June 4, 2026, What Now? with Trevor Noah Adam Grant Gives Trevor an Intellectual Wedgie – Trevor Noah, August 2024, What Now? with Trevor Noah Pickleball Line Rules: Calling the Ball “In” or “Out” – PlayPickleball.com, July 31, 2024, YouTube Cheating in the Age of Generative AI: A High School Survey Study of Cheating Behaviors Before and After the Release of ChatGPT – Lee et al., 2024, Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence Addressing Academic Dishonesty in Higher Education: A Systematic Review of Generative AI’s Impact – Sharma & Panja, 2025, Open Praxis As Schools Reconsider Cursive, Research Homes in on Handwriting’s Brain Benefits – Jonathan Lambert, May 11, 2024, NPR How Learning Handwriting Trains the Brain: The Science Behind the Cursive Wars – Mariana Lenharo, February 2, 2026, Nature The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom – Ose Askvik et al., 2020, Frontiers in Psychology Why Cursive Handwriting Is Good for Your Brain – Christopher Bergland, October 2, 2020, Psychology Today The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Functional Brain Development in Pre-Literate Children – James & Engelhardt, 2012, Trends in Neuroscience and Education How Handwriting Trains the Brain – Gwendolyn Bounds, October 5, 2010, The Wall Street Journal The Self-Importance of Moral Identity – Aquino & Reed, 2002, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Does Moral Identity Effectively Predict Moral Behavior? A Meta-Analysis – Hertz & Krettenauer, 2016, Review of General Psychology Competition and Cheating: Investigating the Role of Moral Awareness, Moral Identity, and Moral Elevation – Vadera & Pathki, 2021, Journal of Organizational Behavior Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior – Tangney et al., 2007, Annual Review of Psychology Shame and Guilt – Tangney & Dearing, 2002, Guilford Press Shame, Guilt, and Depressive Symptoms: A Meta-Analytic Review – Kim et al., 2011, Psychological Bulletin Shame v. Guilt – Brené Brown, January 14, 2013, brenebrown.com Protecting Our Attention, Time and Humanity in a World That Won’t Slow Down – Brené Brown, August 20, 2026, The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant Effectiveness of Ex Ante Honesty Oaths in Reducing Dishonesty Depends on Content – Zickfeld et al., 2025, Nature Human Behaviour Committed Dishonesty: A Systematic Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Social Commitment on Dishonest Behavior – Zickfeld et al., 2024, Psychological Bulletin Detecting and Preventing Cheating in Exams: Evidence From a Field Experiment – Cagala et al., 2024, Journal of Human Resources The Honor Committee – University of Virginia, honor.virginia.edu Effects of Honor Code Reminders on University Students’ Cheating in Unproctored Exams – Zhao et al., 2023, Contemporary Educational Psychology Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences on Academic Integrity: A Replication and Extension to Modified Honor Code Settings – McCabe et al., 2002, Research in Higher Education Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences – McCabe & Treviño, 1993, Journal of Higher Education Bicentennial Analysis – UVA Honor Committee, 2019, University of Virginia Culture Is Not the Problem. Tolerated Behaviour Is. – John Amaechi, February 15, 2026, Giant! with John Amaechi Making a Pledge Can Encourage Honest Behavior—If the Wording Is Right – Simon Makin, Scientific American, February 26, 2025, Scientific American "Do or do not. There is no try” - Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back, Screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, 1980,  [Video] YouTube  I Solemnly Swear I’m Up to Good: A Megastudy Investigating the Effectiveness of Honesty Oaths on Curbing Dishonesty – Zickfeld et al., 2024, HAL Preprint Trump Reports Over $1 Billion in Income From Crypto Ventures – TIME, June 30, 2026, TIME Now Available: The President’s and Vice President’s Public Financial Disclosure Reports – U.S. Office of Government Ethics, 2026, U.S. Office of Government Ethics Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 – U.S. Congress, 2012, Pub. L. No. 112-105 This Is Your Brain on Drugs – Partnership for a Drug-Free America, 1987, YouTube Project D.A.R.E. Outcome Effectiveness Revisited – West & O’Neal, 2004, American Journal of Public Health New Approaches to Youth Substance Misuse – American Psychological Association, March 2024, Monitor on Psychology Beyond Pleasure and Pain – Higgins, 1997, American Psychologist Self-Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect – Higgins, 1987, Psychological Review Possible Selves – Markus & Nurius, 1986, American Psychologist Unwanted Identities: A Key Variable in Shame–Anger Links and Gender Differences in Shame – Ferguson et al., 2000, Sex Roles Shame Resilience Theory: A Grounded Theory Study on Women and Shame – Brown, 2006, Families in Society The BRAVING Inventory – Brené Brown, brenebrown.com An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust – Mayer et al., 1995, Academy of Management Review The Halo Effect: Evidence for Unconscious Alteration of Judgments – Nisbett & Wilson, 1977, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Integrity Is Choosing Courage Over Comfort – Brené Brown, brenebrown.com The Self-Importance of Moral Identity – Aquino & Reed, 2002, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology The Optics of Lying: How Pursuing an Honest Social Image Shapes Dishonest Behavior – Guzikevits & Choshen-Hillel, 2022, Current Opinion in Psychology Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – James Clear, 2018, Avery Learn more about your ad choices. 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Ready to take your investing knowledge to pro-level. This is Fidelity Connects, your daily edge in the markets. Get deep insights on real-time market topics that may impact your investment portfolio. Listen to Fidelity Connects on Spotify today and power your next move tomorrow. Megan Rapino here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I am talking with W. Kamau Bell, and he is no stranger to creating his own lane. We dig into the whys behind some of his biggest decisions, like holding space for Ted Danson,

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Trust me, you don't want to skip this one. Find Pivot on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to The Curiosity Shop. A show from the Fox Media Podcast Network. Hey there. Hey, Renee. Just for all of you listening or watching, Adam and I just both finished teaching very intense intensive. So Adam taught an MBA intensive at Wharton.

I taught an MBA intensive that just ended like a couple days ago at University of Texas McCombs. How was it for you? How was your, how intense was your intensive? Exilarating and exhausting all at once. How about you? Oh, my God. too, it was the paradox of those. And, you know, I just think for the students, I appreciate an intensive because it really allows students to get in, take a course, learn a ton. But I'm starting to wonder

about saturation and intensives. Like, what, what you're thinking on that? I've been wondering about that, too. I love the fact that they're not distracted by other classes and they can go all in on leadership and teamwork. And then I wonder, it's a week and then they're done. Are they going to forget in a year or two? Yeah, that's interesting. We scheduled some follow-ons. And so we're going to keep coming back. And I really appreciated especially this cohort. It's the first time I've taught this cohort of MBA working professionals. So they have full-time jobs. And it was really nice, especially for, you know, I'm teaching during leadership, teamwork. And it was so nice to have all the stories about where they're filing those things because some of them were ICs, a lot of them

there were people leaders, all of them on teams. So it always like reinvigorates my hope for people when I teach. Do you feel the same way in the classroom? Same. Same. I feel like we get to see the best of our students so often and the best of their generation. A hundred percent. Yeah. It was great. So interestingly, you just had, let's segue to our time. Let's segue to our topic today. You just had an op-ed hit the New York Times on cheating. And I think this has so many implications, not just for the classroom, but for life. Tell me about, I get to interview you a little bit, which I love. Tell me about what you wrote for folks who haven't seen it yet. Why you wrote it. The atom restrained fury is bouncing off the page with this.

Did you feel it? I did. I totally felt it. I was, I don't know if I was more shocked or dismayed or morally outraged, but a few years ago, I gave what was going to be my first take-home final exam in the AI era. and for a long time I've given my students a really challenging exam because as I explained it to them, I think what they're learning is important and I want them to master the material. So there are some very hard multiple choice and short answer questions

and there are also some essay questions. And I wrote the exam as I always do and the night before I got these panic notes from a bunch of students saying our classmates are planning to cheat. And what they explained to me was that they had built a custom large language model where they ingested all of the course materials, the readings, the powerpoints, the notes they took. And they were just going to pull that up and use it to ace the exam. And I feel like I went through the five stages of grief in five minutes there because, Bray, these were students. I spent the whole fall trying to do everything I could to.

support and help. And I just took for granted that they had high moral standards. And I guess that was naive of me. But the idea that they would not only cheat on the course, but also cheat themselves out of learning the material, just it kind of shook me to my core. And that was the genesis of wanting to tackle this topic. So what did you do? What was your response? I mean, I immediately knew I couldn't give the exam as I'd planned it. You know, originally I was, I was extra sad because it was supposed to be an in-person exam. And through some stroke of bad luck or good luck, I don't know what, we had the last day. It was, I think most of my students were going to be done a week earlier.

But then they were going to have to stay on campus just for my exam and to accommodate them. I said, fine, we'll just, we'll do, we'll do an online exam. And that was the way they responded. to take advantage of that. So I knew I had to throw out the exam I wrote. When they logged in the next day, they found only essay. There were no multiple choice questions. There were no short answer questions. And the essay that I asked them to write was about cheating. And I said, look, you know, I've heard that some students were planning to cheat. So you just took a whole class on organizational psychology, used course concepts to explain why might students, you know,

be motivated to cheat? And how could we change that? And? And I got some panicked notes from students afterward saying, this is not what I studied for. You broke the contract. And I said, I don't think I'm the one who broke the contract. I think some of your classmates were planning to from what I've heard. And I don't want to penalize anyone. So I will, I'll give everybody a shot at writing these, you know, these responses. But I thought, Renee, I thought what I was going to see was a handful of students would rationalize cheating and their responses. And I thought those would potentially be the cheaters. And everybody else would tell me how upsetting it is that students would do this and it's not the norm. And what I got back was night and day different from that.

What did you get back? You're just going to make me tell it all, aren't you? I'm going to make you take it out. Yeah, I am because... Oh, so sad. Yeah, what did you get back? All right. Well, the students who said cheating is wrong were in the minority.

Yeah. Most of the students made excuses. They said, well, you know, an Ivy League school is a pressure cooker. And we're just, we're stressed. and everyone cheats. And so it's like, it was almost like they were major league baseball players during the doping era.

And they just said, look, you got to use chat GPT is your performance enhancing drug. This is how you win. I did make the rules. I just winning, yeah. Exactly. This is a broken system

and we are doing what we need to do to survive in it. And I was just appalled that there was no mention in a lot of the essays of integrity. There was no, there wasn't even in a lot of cases any guilt or shame about cheating, which historically even cheaters felt, which I want to talk to you about. Shame expert. Yeah, no. As you can imagine,

prepping for our conversation, I've read your op-ed like three times, four times. I've underlined it. I've done all the things I do when I really want to understand something. And I'm conflicted. I'm really conflicted. Tell me why. I don't know. It's like I'm nervous. It's like it's on when I was, when I, we both recently done a podcast with Trevor Noah and when I was on it, I was thinking, you know, sometimes I'd love to get on a podcast

and just think aloud. And then I'm really scared to do that because then it'll be clipped and it'll be me sounding like, you know, that I'm certain about things. But I think I am genuinely conflicted. about I'm not conflicted at all about cheating oh God I hate cheating like you have no idea I mean like I'm a number one

on the enneagram I there is no there's just I can't stand it I'm not conflicted about cheating I'm conflicted about your students like part of me is thinking wow they are going to be the captains of industry

building an LLM feeding it all the right things, using all the correct prompts, lots of innovation and ingenuity, is that, you know, is it cheating? I don't, yes, I think so. I don't know. I am conflicted about, is AI use cheating? Do we need to be teaching students today how to use AI without losing their own sense of discernment and critical thinking? I'm not sure that I am anti or four.

I just don't, I agree that cheating is bad. I mean, I just couldn't cheat. Yeah, I don't know. But I can get morally superior very quickly. I do think there's a lack of integrity. And I'm wondering if we're testing for the right things. Oh, well, that raises a lot of questions. I want to pick up on one thing you said, which is I can get morally superior very quickly.

Yeah. You say that as if it's a risk and you're trying to avoid it. But here, I actually think it's a benefit. And I think part of the problem is that's missing. Like, where is the sense of honor and integrity around, okay, I'm supposed to learn this material, I'm lying and saying that I didn't. And I'm okay with that. How do you look in the mirror at night? How do you feel like you earned a transcript with a grade on it that is work you did not produce yourself? I want students to be more self-righteous about that. I mean, I couldn't

because it would make me physically ill. It would make me physically ill. It was interesting. I was playing pickleball yesterday. And there was a ball that I called my, you know, our opponents hit a ball and it was a really great ball. And my partner and I looked at each other about the call and I said, I think we call it in. It was too close. And it was interesting because he said on a tournament, I would have called it out. And I was like, as the rest of the open play went, I had heard it two or three more times, man, tournament call, I would have called that out. So I called. So I called. my friend Chaz, who was actually my CFO, and we've known each other for 30 years. And I said, what is this new language I'm hearing? And he said, oh, it's kind of people saying, I'll call it in,

but in a high stakes situation, I was going to, I'd probably call that out. And then he paused for a second, and he was like, you would hate that shit. And I was said, yeah, because it's wrong. If it's too close to call, whether the stakes are high or low, shouldn't matter. You call the ball in. You don't call the ball out. That's just being a good sport, a good opponent, a good competitor. But I think the downside is, nope, there's no downside for me, actually. I was going to say the downside for some people is they could feel like a schmuck. Like, I'm the only, I have this set of rules that I'm following that no one else is following. And that makes me a schmuck. I don't feel like that. But yeah, I'd rather lose a thousand times over than cheat.

Same. Same. I got my, not long ago, I got access to my college recommendation letters. And I was just curious about what was in them. And I didn't even remember. But recently I discovered my college recommendation letters. And my physics teacher wrote that I was a rare student of high integrity because I not only reported an incident of cheating that I observed, but I helped him design. a system to prevent it moving forward. And I was, I had no idea that I was like, of course everyone would do that. And I remember talking to, I guess, a fellow nerd about it. And he said, I don't see anything wrong with cheating. And I said, what do you mean? How could you not see anything wrong with cheating? You, you've aced so many tests. And he said, yeah, I don't cheat because I don't have to, not because I don't see a problem with it. And I remember just being disgusted. And now I feel like this is increasingly a stance among students. I think it's true. I think it is. Why? Why is it happening? It seems like in part it's just the stakes have gone up and the difficulty has gone down.

Yeah, but I mean, like look outside. Like every leader with very few exceptions around the world, corruption, coercion, you know, like, do you see a lot of people getting ahead by how we measure getting ahead? I mean, are you seeing billionaires with, that are, you know, really embracing progressive labor movements among their employees or, you know, are they squashing? I mean, like, I just think, like, I don't know. I don't, the payoff has got to be internal. And I don't even know that I feel that way about cheating because I feel good about myself when I'm honest or that I can't live with the consequences of doing it. And I don't know which is which and it's maybe a little bit of both.

but like, I don't know. What I also see is in high pressure competitive academic environments or high pressure work environments. The leadership, for the most part, sends the messaging win by all. Costs. And if you win by dubious means, that's almost called innovation and ingenuity. these days. So I don't know. I feel like we're, I don't know, I feel like are we like cognitive fuddy-duddies who have succeeded in systems that to some degree were built for us to succeed and now we're in situations and, you know, systems where not everyone is, they're not

built for everyone to succeed and people are seeing the whole world rewarded. Let me ask a question. And I want you to suspend disbelief to answer it a little bit, which I know you're going to hate. Great. Student A and student B take your class. And student A follows all the rules, zero cheating, would turn somebody in who cheats, you know, is that person. and student B is going to build the LLM, use AI, and in a year when you test them, they have the same degree of mastery from your course. They're the same. Are you upset because of the morality of cheating, or are you upset because cheating threatens mastery? Both.

No pause. Both. No pause. I have a principled objection, which is it's just wrong. You can't. Did you tell them they couldn't build an LLM? Oh, of course. It was a closed book exam.

So it was supposed to be an in-person proctored exam. Got it. Okay. And I let them do it online instead. And yeah, they definitely know that they knew, They were very clear on the fact that it would not be allowable to Google an answer, let alone to use AI to get an answer. You know, if we take this from classroom to work, there's something interesting.

There was a quote in here that I think a student wrote you that I see at work all the time. Someone in your survey, yeah, someone in your survey wrote, cheating is a creative expression in a form of problem solving. If you can get around the restrictions put in place and not get caught, then good on you? Yep. There's not a part of you that's like, let me think about that. Nope.

Not at all. Nope. It's wrong. And it's also, in a lot of situations, it's going to be longer on counterproductive. But for your thought experiment, even if it weren't, I would still say it's wrong. You are accepting a grade you did not earn. You're taking credit for a result that you did not generate. Not okay with me.

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That's Q-U-I-N-C-E-D-C-C-Riosity. Okay, so you're proposing a solution in your op-ed that I really want to get into. Me too. Okay. Talk about what you found. This brings us to the other reason that I wanted to write this is I think that the problem is more severe than I thought it was. But also, I don't think we're talking about the right solutions.

Because when I hear my colleagues who teach classes and when I talk with university presidents about how to stop cheating, it's all about proctoring. they've said, okay, we're going to, you know, we're not writing papers anymore. We're going back to Blue Book writing because we want to be able to observe and make sure it's really yours. Take home assignments are more and more problematic. And so we're just going to watch everything.

You can't monitor everything. That's not the solution. No. Just not doable, right? I mean, God Almighty, if I have to grade Blue Books again, I'm retiring. Yeah, we got rid of cursive for a reason. Or at least I can't write in cursive anymore. You probably love it, don't you?

Yes, and the science proves it. How could you be against the science selectively about cursive? I don't think I know the science on cursive. Tell me. Oh, my God. I know handwriting is better than typing. And cursing is, cursive is better than cursing and cursive. That is the most powerful.

You're here for both. That's a Freudian slip, Renee's style. Yeah, I believe in cursing and cursive. You bet in equal measure. I will find that research for you and put it in the show notes. But yeah, I can't grade blue books anymore. Like that, that ship has sailed. But okay, so if we're not proctoring everything, which I do think I hear a lot of my colleagues going toward, I'm going to watch you.

I'm going to watch you produce. which, oh my God, y'all, y'all know that's not going to translate to work environments, right? So, okay, so what do you think? It's not feasible. And also, do we really want to just accept, we're raising a generation of students who are not trustworthy. And we're just going to throw our hands up and say we give up. No. We either monitor them or, no, we're not going to do that.

So I've spent a bunch of time thinking about this, you know, did a deep dive into the research on what do we know about what else prevents cheating? And the answer that came out again and again in the data is identity. It's the point that you made earlier, Brunay, that it's got to come from within. If we can't create a permanent system of monitoring or reward and punishment externally, then we're looking at internal motivation. And in the research on cheating, I think there's a whole set of studies that I think captures it really well, which is the basic finding is across a set of experiments when you raise the stakes of getting a good grade or acing a quiz, cheating goes up because people want the reward and they're willing to cut corners to get it. Except there are some

people who aren't more likely to cheat when mistakes go up. And those are people with strong moral identities who have internalized a sense of honor and integrity. And I think as you were suggesting earlier, they both feel good when. then they do the right thing, and they also feel awful if they even consider doing the wrong thing. And that both fear of being a bad person and desire to be a good person is enough to get them to resist whatever temptation they feel not only to cheat, but also to lie or steal or do anything else unethical. And I think I came away from this, believing that we have essentially abandoned the idea of instilling a moral identity in our students and maybe in our children too. And that's a

mistake. And how, what is the research say about the best way to instill moral identity? I know it's not shame and I know it's not attaching someone's moral identity to their sense of self-worth. that if you engage in these behaviors that are dishonished, you're a terrible person. I don't think that works. So what does the research tell us is the right way to increase moral identity? Well, this is exactly what I wanted to ask you. How confident are you that a little bit of shame isn't helpful here? Because I think at least anticipated shame is one of the common experience.

of people with strong moral identity. I think, and maybe shame is the wrong flavor of it. But when I heard you say a moment ago, I would feel, I feel physically ill at the thought of doing this. Isn't there shame attached to the idea of saying, if I were to cheat, I would have a view of myself that is, you know, I would come to think of myself as a bad person, and so I can't even contemplate that.

No, so for me, that would not be shame. that would be, and again, I think if you look at the correlation between shame and behaviors like aggression, violence, outcomes like addiction, depression, depression, I think shame is far too blunt of an instrument. What I would feel, what I could anticipatorily feel if I cheated, is guilt and the cognitive dissonance of engaging in a behavior that's different than who I want to be. and how I see myself. So the sickening feeling for me is cognitive dissonance.

There's a lack of alignment between who I believe I am and who I say I am and a behavior I just engaged in, which is kind of classic adaptive guilt. Now, in these studies, I wouldn't be surprised if they use terms like anticipatory shame because I don't think a lot of researchers spend a lot of time teasing out shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment.

Yeah. But the reason why I think guilt, is more helpful here is it doesn't seem like based on your survey of your students, that shame is a mediating variable making them feel bad. So I think if you are really talking about moral identity, what moral identity, I believe, does is creates cognitive dissonance when we act outside of who we think we are and who we say we are. And I think that's adaptive guilt. I think that's exactly right. See, you didn't need to ask me that question. You knew the answer.

No, but I do think, I think there's a lot of questions embedded than that because, you know, we could take this into an arena that's really for us if, do you say you watched a film when you watched the trailer and a few snippets on social? Do you do an interview on a podcast with an author if you haven't read every word of the book or whatever? You know, like, do we think students are reading every word of assigned reading? And if they don't read, let me tell you something. As a PhD student, we had 1,500,000 pages sometimes a week that we had to read.

I read for utility. Like, I read for utility. And if a professor looked at me and said, did you do the readings? I'm going to say, I don't know what I would have said, but I probably would have said, yes, because I read them for utility. And I'm prepared to answer any question you have for me. Quiz me, quiz me. But quiz me, mother trucker, is different than it's still, I probably said, yes, I read. And so where's my line? You know, and so what I'm wondering about is, are we

talking about cheaters versus, you know, cheating and not cheating, dishonesty and honesty. Are we talking about moral ambiguity? Yeah. And what role do we have in saying, let me tell you what's not ambiguous in this course and what's ambiguous. If you want to read the book, you read the book any way you want. But I'm going to take full authority to quiz you on any part of it that I want to. I love that framing of it. Yeah.

You know, and if I say, here's what I need. I always tell my students, because I think this is true, I have some. signed a contract, a legal contract with this university, saying that I'm going to cover this information and that upon successful completion of this course, I can almost promise the university that you understand the following things. Yeah. And I take that obligation super seriously. So if at the end of the class, I feel like they have mastered that material. am I overly invested in how? I'm just asking, I don't know.

I don't know the answer. No, I don't think you should be. I'm grappling. But when you can no longer gauge whether they've mastered the material or not because they may just be copying their answers from an AI tool, then you have a problem. I got to be honest with you.

Like, this is a hard conversation. And I feel like this at work too sometimes. Do you ever get to the point where you're just like screw it? I have a piece of the course that's self-graded, and I can always predict the students who are going to be harsher on themselves and more probably appropriately evaluative

and those that are just going to give themselves the straight highest grade. And I don't fight them, because if that's the way you choose to live your life, I'm going to spend zero interest and energy on that. If you come to me, however, for a recommendation on anything, zero chance, and I'll tell you exactly why I'm not going to give it to you.

Yeah, same. Yeah. You scored yourself a 10 out of 10 on a rubric where there was no way you got a 10 because it would have been observable by me in the classroom because it was this kind of sharing or that kind of sharing. So if you're good with that, I'm not babysitting your morality here. Great. But don't come to me for anything.

Yeah, I think that's a reasonable stance. I think I've had to have conversations with students before where I've said, I don't think I'm in the best position to write you the letter full of detailed, glowing praise that I'm sure you're seeking. And so I would recommend asking someone else. If I can't write you, if it doesn't say, I fully recommend Adam Grant for this position without any reservations, please call me on my cell phone if you have any questions. If I can't write that, I don't write your letter of recommendation. I just tell you, I think you'll be able to find a stronger one somewhere else. That's generally my position to you. And interestingly, I think that's an expression of moral identity for both of us.

That is for sure is because I, yeah. I'm not going to voice someone on somebody else who did not, who I can't vouch for. Yeah. I think that's true. I wonder if it would be helpful for people listening or watching. it would be helpful for me if we bucket what we're talking about because we're sliding into related areas that are different. And so I want to be really clear about cheating. Well, maybe this is the discussion we're having. I don't know it. But cheating to me is an active

behavior of breaking agreed upon rules for your benefit. Yeah. I find no moral ambiguity in that whatsoever. Nope. Very clear. Yeah, very clear to me. Using whatever your methodologies are that are within the confines of the rules to varying degrees, read it off by word, read summaries, get a spark note, whatever, and being

willing to be held accountable for math. of the material I'm actually okay with. Same. AI does not always equate to cheating for me. So it's really about, and this was in actually the AMA we did for the Curiosity Shop, why I'm seeing trust implode on teams right now, because they haven't gone through an exercise as a team of saying, here's what's okay for AI use in our team. team and here's what's not okay. Just two columns. You know, you can use it for background information.

You cannot use it for discernment. You have to let us know when you use it, you can't use it and not disclose when it's being used. You know, like those kind of just basic rules. Yeah. So it sounds like we're pretty much aligned. Yeah. I think we are. The only place where I'm unsure is tell me about the research in the op-ed where what was effective teaching of ethical awareness and what wasn't? Some pretty big studies. Yeah. What did you learn? Yeah.

I mean, the data are powerful here. And I actually, I think this goes to the question of, let's go to the next level of how do you actually develop a moral identity or activate a moral identity. Okay. Because I think you, I think you captured it beautifully when you said, I don't want shame. I might want some adaptive guilt. But how do we cultivate that? So let's just do a quick walkthrough of what we know. There have been a whole series of experiments where you try to use an honor code or an honesty

pledge. And the results are inconsistent. Sometimes you see a reduction in cheating. Sometimes you see no effect. Sometimes you actually see an increase in cheating. And the experiment that really stopped me in my tracks on this shows. showed that if you asked students to sign an honesty pledge before an exam, the rate of cheating doubled.

Is the messaging, wow, everybody's doing this. This is why we have to sign it, so it's normalizing it? Exactly. Yeah. It seems to be that if you're not careful, when you ask everybody to sign an oath saying, I'm going to do the right thing, you're implicitly messaging. You know what? Everybody's cheating. And then students assume, well, I guess it's, I guess it's normal. Table stakes. Yeah. So that does not work well.

Wait, can I stop you here? Can I stop here and ask a question? Yeah, please. What do we know about these or do we know, I think, of some universities pop into my mind right off the bat that have very strong kind of, that's part of their marketing material. Do we know anything from those universities? Am I right in saying like UVA has a really big one?

What do we know from those? Anything from university-wide honor-concats? I don't know. It's a really good question. I think they're hard to study in a controlled way because they're so embedded in the institution that you don't really have a control group. And so let's say UVA has a great honor code and they also seem to have lower rates of cheating than other schools. Is it because you attracted students who cared about integrity and they wanted to be UVA students? Is it that you've actually changed their behavior in some way through the code? For me, the jury's out. Do you have any sense of it?

I don't have a sense of it, but this is where I think shit goes bad very quickly, is the enforcement of honor codes randomly and enforcing those honor codes and letting some folks a privilege slide. Yeah. So unequal enforcement based on identity and power, I think, is the fastest stake through the heart of any kind of trust, honor code, ethic is when the accountability is unevenly applied and when privilege and power are mediating variables around accountability. That is so problematic to me. And again, I'm not, I mean, I'm just, I've seen that over and over. And so when we're like, hey, we have these rules and we're going to enforce them only against groups that

have no access to power and are in systems not built for them. So I just, I've never seen persuasive data on what we're talking about. So I think it's interesting that you haven't either. So let's just keep going. What else? What have you seen? I am with you there. And you're reminded me of John Amici's definition of culture. He says culture is the worst behavior tolerated. I mean, that's it. If you let students because daddy or mommy is rich or because they are an athlete, if you let them get away with things that others wouldn't, guess what? You don't have a culture of integrity.

No. You're choosing to tolerate that behavior. Yeah. And in those systems, it's fight club, baby. like it's it's everybody for themselves because that's what you've built and it's a culture of silence too what's the first rule of fight club yeah no fight club we don't talk about fight club right okay so what was effective are there effective ways to increase or change moral identity or build it so i think in terms of activating it assuming that you know everybody has some degree of it some people hold it more

strongly than others. There was an experiment with over 20,000 people, which basically reduced cheating by reminding students of the moral implications of their actions. And there were a few different ways to do this that I thought were interesting. One that I never would have thought of was to disrupt the tendency to compartmentalize. Oh, yeah. We've all seen people say, well, you know, I did this. But that little instance of cheating, no, that doesn't make me a cheater. Or, you know what? Everybody's doing this. And therefore, it's not really cheating.

The way to interrupt that tendency was to give students a pledge that said, I understand that honesty is an all or nothing concept. In other words, you're either honest or you're not. And you confront that. And you say, huh, I can't cheat a little and say, but I'm not a cheater. Because I'm either honest or I'm cheating. And I've got to choose. I thought that was clever.

What did you think of that one? I mean, it's very Yoda. Do or do not. There is no try. Right. I mean, do or do not, right? Do or do not? Yeah, that's, God dang, that was good.

Was it? I don't know. I need to work on my Yoda impression. No, it's really good. Yeah, I think there's a potential backlash, but let's keep going. Okay, so a second way to activate moral identity or appeal to it was to remind students of just a deep a sense of justice and fairness that maybe they subscribe to in the abstract, but they hadn't linked it to, well, what am I going to do on this exam? And the way of doing that was to ask them to sign a

statement that said, I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. That one spoke to me, because I think that got, for me, it got right to the heart of, but you are then, you're claiming a reward that you did not earn. I don't know. I just see when you say those statements, just to be honest with you, I just see how people could dismantle them in a microsecond. Tell me. So say the statement again.

Okay, so the statement is, I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. Yeah. And there's nobody in here getting anything that they deserve. This place is so screwed up. The system is so screwed up. No one is getting what they deserve except for a couple of people. And I'm going to get exactly what I deserve by any means necessary in a system that's completely flawed. And how much cryptocurrency does the president deserve? dear inter precedency. And how much, and on both sides of the aisle, how much early insider trading does anyone who's an elected representative deserve, like, we're not in a system. I mean, I can just see. Yeah.

And the worst thing is, again, I don't want to be the proponent for cheating in this conversation because I'm not built for it. But when systems are corrupt and bankrupt, it makes it so hard. Yeah. Like for me, the sentence that would work, so we've got, I understand. understand that honesty is an all or nothing concept. I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. The last one got to me. Do you want to read the last one? Yeah. This is the one that I found least compelling. It's so interesting that it's the one that spoke to you. Yeah. Wait, before we go to it, I just want to say one thing on the fraudulent one. I think you're right

that a lot of people can rationalize it by saying, hey, but everybody around me is getting something they don't deserve. Why not me too? I wonder if that's why it's not more effective. It is one of the most effective statements that's been tested, but there's still a lot of noise in that effect. And I wonder if it would be better if there's an addition to it that goes something along the lines of this. I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. I recognize that there are people who have gotten where they are through that. And I don't want to contribute to that system. I don't want to be part of that system because I believe in creating something fair and just and better. Does that work better for you? It does because now we're in my third one. Because that goes

to the third one, right? Yes. My third one is I recognize my honesty fosters a culture of trust, mutual respect and social responsibility, inspiring others to act with integrity. So I am going to be much more. I am going to be the person, you know, if I see the just say no or this is your brain on drugs. I'm like, yeah, shut up. Those worked on me. That's so funny. Oh, did they? Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if I saw something from like more of the social positive marketing, hey, 70% of the students on this campus do not do drugs, I'd be like, oh, wait, I want to belong. I wonder if it's easy to dismantle, again, work, home, cheating on

partners, whatever the dishonesty is. I wonder if there are some of us that are motivated by who we don't want to be. Yeah. And some of us motivated, I'm going to tie this to shame research. It's really interesting. Some of us motivated by who we don't want to be. And some of us motivated more by who we absolutely want to be. Does that make sense?

It does. It reminds me of the tour. Higgins' research on self-discrepancy theory and how there are ideal and ought selves. Or we could go to Hazel Marcus and say, Hope for versus feared possible selves, which one is stronger? And my hunch is, although I haven't seen good data on this, my hunch is that in general the prevention avoidance messaging is more effective in the realm of cheating than the promotion approach, because you can still feel like a good person.

in other ways. Whereas if you do this and that makes you think you might have done something wrong, there's no way around that. It's interesting. I don't know. I think what I go to Tamara Ferguson's research on unwanted identity and how the quintessential elicitor of shame is unwanted identity. I do not want to be perceived as. And then when we ask people to list those, they can list those very quickly. I don't want to be perceived as, you know, they can list a million things, not good enough, ugly, you know, you could do a thousand. Unintelligent. Yeah. Unkind. Yep. But to really understand shame in our lives and how it operates, we also have to understand it is critically important to me that I am perceived as. And so a lot of times will unearth things there that don't come up.

not always the opposite of what comes up. Like, you know, I don't want to be perceived as not smart. It's important to me that I'm perceived as smart. We don't see that as much as we see just these kind of random things. And for me, I don't know if it's because I feel more control over how I'm perceived rather than how I, you know, I don't want to be perceived because I can't control that. But I can act in ways. I don't know.

I think this is very, very much points to, okay, can I just take us on a non-sequitur for work? Yes, please. So one of the things that we learned in the Dare to Lead research was how difficult it is to bring folks in on one-on-ones to talk about trust. And, you know, and what do we mean when we mean trust? and how do we define trust and what is trust? And so we came up with the acronym braving for trust. Boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault or confidentiality, integrity, which is where this would fall, non-judgment and generosity or assumption of positive intent.

So this is the seven elements of trust that we train and teach. And we measure. Boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault, integrity, non-judgment. and generosity. There is some debate, especially in the practice community around trust. So let's say I work for you, you bring me in, and we're doing our once a quarter kind of trust check-in on braving, which is what we encourage people to do so that trust conversations are not weird. Here's where I think we're strong. Here's where we could work together. Some people think that the trust score is an average of all of those. So I give you five points out of one, you know.

but some people believe it's the product. And if any of them are a zero, then you don't trust somebody at all. Why did you say, why did you say nope so fast? Well, I said no in part because they don't all have equal weights. But also there are some dimensions that drive it to zero if you fail on them. Say more.

That depends on the task, though, and what you have to trust the person to do, right? Yeah. So, yeah, I'm coming to the conclusion that I do believe that trust can be dimensional, that I can count on you around reliability and accountability. You're delivering on time. You're delivering good deliverables. But I don't really trust you on Vault.

I don't share confidential things with you because I know that you're a spreader of – you like social capital. So you're always running around, yeah, telling people shit that you shouldn't, you know. And so I kind of believe that you can have high levels of dimension. I don't know if you can have any zeros. I haven't decided yet. I mean, it's so interesting. I love your seven dimensions. And they capture fault is a missing dimension of trust in my world of management and organizational psychology where trust breaks down to integrity, benevolence, ability, and sometimes reliability. Wait a minute. I guess that's just

lumped under integrity is another facet of it. But it's a different phenomenon because we all know high integrity people that would not cheat, for example, but are very comfortable. sharing information that's confidential with others. And when we study this, what I've seen in our data is when people form a positive impression of you on one dimension of trust, they tend to assume that you're trustworthy on all the others until something happens that bites them. And all of a sudden they realize, oh, no. And then sometimes they overreact and just decide you're not trustworthy, period.

But I think the more nuanced reaction is exactly what you said, which is, oh, I now know I can trust you to do this, but not that. What's interesting, too, about Vault that really freaks people out, I mean, every time we teach this, which is all the time, I've just taught it in the MBA program. So this, I'll give you, we'll do a little roleplay. You call me into the office and we're doing our trust kind of audit once a couple times a year, which I love because that means we can have really explicit conversations about trust. They're not, you know, we're naming it, we're talking about the importance of building trust. We're talking about the dimensions of trust. And you say, where I think we're really struggling right now,

Bernay, is vault. And I said, you know what, Adam, I don't get it. You share highly confidential proprietary things with me all the time. And I have not once shared any of those things with anybody. And then you say, I know, but you often come in here and share things with me that are not yours to share. And that's when, like, a whole group of people when I, explain that, go, wait, what?

Yep. And then I said, you know, raise your hand if you want to be on the receiving end of really good gossip prochizema. Everybody's like, yes. And I said, and raise your hand when that person leaves your office if you trust them less. Everybody raises their hand. And they're like, oh, my God, the other side of the vault. It's not just that you'll keep what I share with you confidential.

It's that you don't share things with me that are not yours to share. Yes. So important. Yeah, but so misunderstood. Do you know what I mean? It's like we just don't talk about both of those sides. And it's interesting because in teams where someone has shared, you know, I've received that feedback before that I share too much, especially with my boss, I'll get under like, tell me what's driving it. When you do it and it feel, how does it feel?

feels great. It feels like I'm being helpful. And then we talk about social capital and we talk about the awkward situation that can put people in and how they just trust you less. So I think it's, I didn't think we'd end up here, but I do think, it's really important. I do think the last the last couple of lines of your op-ed is everything we're talking about. The heart of integrity is recognizing that the ends don't justify the means. What we achieve may define our success, but how we achieve it determines our character. Like, I think that's so important. I do. I think the means are a measure of our character. And we live in a world, unfortunately, that only measures the ends, not the means. The means are hard to measure. They're often unobservable. And that's why people

take shortcuts or cut corners or cheat. And I think that, you know, it's so interesting. You're, I know you're trying to wrap this up here, but I have to comment on two things that I think are so interesting. One is, in braving, when you talk about the V, so the other side of Vault, I think what you're doing there is you're helping people realize that's actually an integrity violation. And they're not aware of it. So it may be somebody with a strong moral identity who has not connected the practice of disclosing somebody else's secret. or confidential information with somebody that they trust as a violation. Yes. Yes.

I think that's right. And I think that's where people are like, oh, shit. Yeah, it's huge. And it's interesting. You would love our definition of integrity that we use for our work, because this will really make you crazy with your cheating issue. Uh-oh. Yeah.

Integrity is actively practicing your values, not just professing them, and doing what's right, not what's fun. fast or easy. Yes. Nailed it. Nailed it. Yeah. This is one of my favorite versions of René Brown is the you go out into the world and study something that everybody thinks they already understand and you come up with a more nuanced, more complex, more comprehensive understanding of it. You synthesize it in a way that makes it digestible so that people can actually like pulse check in their relationships, in their interactions. So they can look in the mirror. and see how they're doing on these dimensions.

And you help us see something both more clearly and also more complexly than we would have otherwise. I love that. I love that so much. Oh, thank you. It's really powerful. It also, I think it underscores the other thing that I'm really thinking about as a result of this conversation, which is I think a lot of people make the mistake

of conflating moral identity with moral image. I want to be perceived as a good person. I don't want to be seen as a bad person. At the end of the day, that just makes you vulnerable to what everyone else is doing. That opens up the possibility that if everybody else is cheating or a lot of people are cheating, then you know what? They're not going to judge me negatively. So this is okay here or this is okay now.

Wow. I think moral identity has got to be about your self-concept. It has to be about I don't want to see myself as. a person who would do that. I want to see myself as a person who does the right thing. And I think that's what we've got to be doing in homes and schools and workplaces is laying out really clearly what it means to see yourself as a good person, as a person of, in this case, honor and integrity. And then what are the behaviors that if you engaged in would violate that? What are the behaviors that if you do them consistently would uphold that? And I think that's how we nurture moral identity

is we engage kids starting when they're young in the process of reflecting on what kind of person do I want to see myself as? And what do I need to do in order to earn that identity? And what do I need to make sure also I don't do in order to avoid developing that sense of me? I think this is the heart of everything we've been talking about, moral image, which is so vulnerable and susceptible to it's movable. It's movable. Yeah. Moral identity, not movable.

And what's really interesting to me is I think honesty is a discipline and a practice. And I think you're faced with those things 50 times a day. Like I remember when I remember getting to the car, you know, Charlie's a baby. I think I wrote about this in a book as an example. Charlie's a baby. Ellen's, you know, we're picking up a poster board is why I think we're at H-E-B or grocery store. And I'd run in, Charlie's crying, and I'd get back, and I'd paid cash, and they gave me a 20 instead of a 10. And like, in that split second, I was like, Charlie's too young to learn the lesson anyway, but then

I'm like, Ella, you know, I'm like, oh, Ellen's, you know, it's like, I, you know, I've got them in their car seats. I've like, we got to go back in. And they're like, H.E.B. has a lot of money, but this is not mine. You know, and it's, it's a thousand times a day where we have to make those decisions. Yeah. And I don't know that I always make them. I don't know that I, I will debate you if it's a violent movie that I can't watch. I will watch enough of it to debate you about the meaning of that movie having seen, you know, five-eighths of it.

And then when the person goes, did you watch the movie? I'm like, did you watch the movie? And yeah, I think I'm imperfect around this. I think... That's your white lie. Yeah. What do you think of my new haircut? Awesome. Yeah, I'm not... I could always get better, but I do think it's a discipline that I care about. And I don't think it's a discipline that I care about. and I don't think it's ever going to be externally motivated. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is why I think it's more guilt than shame. I think that resonates. Yeah, I was thinking about what my version of this is, and it's very similar. Although, I would just say, I think I watched it enough in the movie to have the debate with you. But to be honest, I didn't want those images in my head, so I turned it off. But I think my version of this is similar, which is I don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. And so I will sometimes withhold what could be a constructive criticism because I don't think they can handle it. And I'll just say, yeah, I thought that was great when I really thought it was okay or pretty good.

And I've got some notes. Yeah. I mean, I think now we're into like a different area that I think it's been a great conversation, I think, because we started with intentionally. breaking rules to get a better grade regardless of the rules, just cheating. And it gets, I don't know. I think my takeaway is Yoda. Do or don't, you know, I mean, you just have to make a decision. And I think what's also interesting is if you're interested in the rumble, the internal rumble, I think it's worth figuring out the messaging that speaks to you the most. And it doesn't have to be the same for all of us. It's about who I want to be, not who about who I'm afraid that

I could be. My reminders that work for me is, you know, I don't say to myself, hey, you know, let's skip working, you know, I got to go work out today because I don't want to be whatever the word is. What works for me is I'm going to go work out today because I think of myself as an athlete. That's my identity, you know. And you have to earn that identity every day. On the senior tour, but nonetheless. It's good conversation. I appreciate it. Right back at you.

The Curiosity Shop is produced by Bray Brown, Education and Research Group, and granted productions. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.com.