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Monday, July 22, 2013

Shining a Light on Honesty

New
research shows that bright lights make people more honest, altruistic, ethical,
and less selfish. People in a brightly lit room donated more
than twice as much as those in a dim room, and were more likely to offer to
help others.

“We
provide the first experimental evidence showing that brightness appears to
heighten the salience of morality to the individual, thereby leading people to
perform ethical deeds,” say the researchers from National Sun Yat-sen
University, Taiwan, who report their findings in the Journal of Environmental
Psychology.

“We
suggest that brightness may enhance the self-importance of morality and thereby
increase ethical behavior.” The researchers carried out a series of experiments
with three levels of brightness under 12, eight, and four fluorescent lights.

In
one experiment, men and women were told they were playing a game which involved
sharing money between themselves and a stranger said to be in another room.
Those in the brightest room offered around 15 per cent more of the cash than
those in the moderately lit room, and around 30 per cent more than the people
in the dimmest room.

Researchers
determined an 85.2 per cent honesty rate for people in the well-lit room, 70.4
per cent for the those in the moderately lit room, and 51.9 per for those under
dim lighting.

About Gregory LeFever

Attributions

I Ching commentaries on my blog are from the classic The I Ching or Book of Changes, translated by Richard Wilhelm with a Forward by Carl Jung, Princeton University Press, 1950. By the way, when selecting entries for my blog, I don't "throw" anything to discover the hexagram - I simply open the book at random and see what's there.

Selections from the Tao Te Ching are from Stephen Mitchell's translation.