I’ve recently written about Dan Ariely’s free course that I’ve also been taking. One of his books is called The (Honest) Truth about Dishonesty.. I’ve been wondering how some of what I’ve learned by reading that book can be applied to my normal life — which for me means life in casinos.
Today I want to apply this to an on-going promotion that is offered at the Palms Casino in Las Vegas. Variations of this promotion occur elsewhere as well.
In this promotion, you can earn points and redeem them at any specified time (i.e., Monday-Friday, during stated hours) for the two weeks. For example, let’s say you have 8,000 unredeemed video poker points and you want the gas cards. You can only collect one of each of these gifts per day. You can collect one $10 gift card today (costing you 4,000 points) and another one on another day prior to the end of the promotion. (Whether standing in line for one $10 gas card is something you would choose to do is a decision you would have to make for yourself!)
On the last day of the promotion, everything involved with redeeming points for prizes takes longer. Someone may have earned lots of points during the two weeks of the promotion, already collected some lubes, car washes, and gift cards, but still has more points left. Points are earned at different rates for video poker and slots and some players play both. (This particular time all of the video poker points required for prizes were exactly eight times as much play as you needed for slot machine play. Sometimes it’s not always a consistent multiple from prize to prize.) The workers at the promotion desk need to add up what has been earned and subtract off what has already been redeemed. It’s not particularly difficult arithmetic, and most of the workers get it right most of the time. Suffice it to say, however, that some of the workers are better at coming up with a correct final balance than others. And players are more likely to correct these workers when the errors are in the house’s favor than when they are in the player’s favor.
So here’s the scenario: It’s the last day of such a promotion. You’ve redeemed your points several times already and you know for sure that you have 20,000 as-yet-unredeemed points and you want a $50 gift card. When you finally make it up to the front of the line, you are informed that you have 60,000 unredeemed points! The worker has made an error in your favor. In addition to the expected $50 gift card, they will also give you a $100 gift card that casino management didn’t intend for you to have. What do you do? What do you think most players would do?
My seat-of-the-pants guess is that 70% of players would keep the unearned card, but that number can change, depending . . . . Your guess may be higher or lower than that. But so far this is just setting the scene and doesn’t get into what I’m really musing about.
Case A. Same scenario, except:
A1— the player won $1,000 during this promotion.
A2 — the player lost $1,000 during this promotion.
Do you think that whether players won or lost would affect how honest they were in this case?
Case B. Same scenario, except:
B1 — the player broke about even and when he came to collect there was no line and he got his cards right away.
B2 — the player broke about even but he had to wait one hour in line before he got his cards.
Do you think that whether or not players had to wait would affect how honest they were in this case?
Case C. Same scenario, except: In the four cases above, instead of asking what you think other players would do, we ask what YOU would do. Would that change your responses?
I’m assuming most people were raised on something akin to the “Thou Shalt Not Steal!” commandment. Keeping the extra card is against all of our moral codes. Yet many of us will fail to adhere to our moral beliefs in such a situation.
Anything I say now is just speculation because this exact case hasn’t been studied. However, according to Ariely’s research, while most people cheat a little, most people also think of themselves as basically good people. People will sometimes cheat more if they can easily rationalize it to themselves. Other times, people will cheat more if they are feeling depleted, meaning things haven’t been going well for them recently.
In Case A, I would expect losing players to be more likely than winning players to keep the extra gift card. Stealing is still wrong, but it’s easier to justify it to ourselves when we say, “The casino is already sitting on $1,000 of my money. Taking a little of that back is only right!” Some folks are better at coming up with rationalizations than others, but most of us do it some of the time.
In Case B, I would expect players who had just stood in line for an hour to be far more inclined to keep the extra card. Should the wait time matter when it comes to morality? Of course not! But it’s easy to feel angry at the casino for “making” you wait, and this extra card might be a handy source of revenge. (There’s a lesson here for casinos. Hiring extra, competent staff might be cheaper than having aggravated customers who will rip you off because of this aggravation).
In Case C, I suspect that something less than 40% of people would confess to probably keeping the extra card. But if we asked them if they thought most others would keep the extra card, likely estimates of around 70% would be more common. Most of us tend to think of ourselves as being more honest than average.
While it is something Ariely has not yet written about (at least not to my knowledge), I suspect that people are LESS HONEST in casinos than they are in most other environments. It is easy to convince yourself that casinos are greedy establishments that keep more than their share. Most people lose in casinos most of the time. If you’re fortunate enough to find a situation where you can slip the odds into your favor occasionally by doing something a little underhanded, you might jump at that chance. If you drop your wallet in church, there’s a decent chance you’ll get it back with your original money still intact. If you drop your wallet in a casino, goodbye wallet!