@ Eric: Yes and no. While he doesn’t deny that the chance to get caught is a factor in willingness to cheat, his point is that the correlation between the two is not absolute. Allowing yourself to cheat is also strongly driven by your perception of yourself, from which the anonymity of the internet cannot shield you. I think in your example you should think of internet message boards as full of cheaters wearing Carnegie Mellon sweatshirts.

@ All: Another good listen regarding the psychology of moral choice: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/analysis/8120646.stm

The comments here seem to offer either blanket approval or personal accounts of irony as identification with the professor’s narrative; we all want to be “in” too.

I argue that the professor employs his wit and status together as a mechanism that allows him to “cheat”. His review of his experiments seems peurile, but it is taken as sufficient evidence that economists never admit or contend with the impossibility of grafting pure economic logic onto irrational human beings. This is treated as a revelation.

Other “cheats” in the speech are the suggestions that the latter-day economic tokens (i.e. CDOs, derivatives, etc…) are themselves instruments of corruption. If the professor was brave enough, he might also contend that money itself is an (if not “the”) instrument of corruption; you can not eat or shelter yourself with money.

I’m struck that this is yet another pithy talk aimed to influence the audience to accept irony in garden variety token-based economics (and with good humour), but to beware the excesses of such tokens, and the suggestions of the powerful… professors’ excepted I suppose.

Nothing to see here, move along.

http://www.amazon.com/Predictably-Irrational-Hidden-Forces-Decisions/dp/006135323X

Very interesting read and definitely recommended to anyone who is going to try and market something. Even if its just trying to increase the amount of people who are interested in a certain podcast!