Behavioral Economics in the Confession Booth

In an interview with RSA Journal , Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, explains how the Catholic practice of confession helps motivate people to make better long-term decisions:

Matthew Taylor: This is the kind of insight that drives me to reconsider social conservatism. Economic historian Avner Offer, for example, has argued that society creates certain ‘commitment devices’ – marriage, the welfare state, the church – that enable us to deal with our frailties. He goes on to claim that, when we became affluent in the 1960s and 1970s, we no longer needed these devices, which led to a situation in which we were richer but not happier. So, do you think institutions have a value in motivating people to make decisions that are better for them in the long term?

Dan Ariely: These institutions have evolved over a long time and involve many clever features. If you spend £25,000 on a wedding in front of lots of people, for instance, you’re less likely to break off the relationship when things are not going as smoothly as you would hope. When we engage in an outcome that we think is irreversible, we often become committed to it and, by doing so, find ourselves enjoying it more.

Another interesting institution is the Catholic practice of confession. From a rational perspective, confession is a strange mechanism: after all, if you knew you could get absolved for cheating, you ought to be inclined to cheat more often, ideally on the way to the church to minimise the chances of dying without absolution. However, our experiments in cheating show a particular pattern: people start by cheating a little bit, because they’re trying to balance feeling good about themselves with benefiting from cheating, but after they’ve reached a certain point, they begin thinking of themselves as cheaters and, once this happens, they start cheating a lot. In this instance, confession really helps, as it gives people a chance to turn over a new page.

What this shows is that people inherently want to be honest – more honest, in fact, than traditional economic theory suggests – but once they start thinking of themselves as a bad person, there’s nothing to stop them from carrying on down that road.