What if truth succeeded

You can change your habits to become a better student. You can change your attitudes and become a more positive, motivated student. Develop a personal ethical code. Do what is right for you and for others. The college world demands ethical standards and rewards responsible, ethical behavior. Be proud of who you are and your good decisions. Enjoy your life! Enjoy meeting new people, learning new things, and experiencing the diversity of the college experience.

Most college graduates look back on their college years as one of the best periods in their whole lives! At college, we focus on the active process of learning, not just on how to get good grades. The attitude of some students that grades are the only thing that matters in academics has led many students to resort to academic dishonesty to try to get the best possible grades or handle the pressure of an academic program.

Technology has made it easier to cheat. But be aware that technology has also created ways for professors to easily detect these forms of academic dishonesty. If you feel uneasy about doing something in your college work, trust your instincts.

Confirm with the professor that your intended form of research or use of material is acceptable. Even when you have clear goals and are motivated and focused to achieve them, problems sometimes happen. Accept that they will happen, since inevitably they do for everyone. The difference between those who succeed by solving the problem and moving on and those who get frustrated and give up is partly attitude and partly experience —and knowing how to cope when a problem occurs.

Here are a few examples:. Some things happen that we cannot prevent. But many other kinds of problems can be prevented or made less likely to occur. Preventing the problems that typically keep college students from succeeding is much of what this Guide is all about. Not all problems can be avoided. Other problems, such as a social or relationship issue or an academic problem in a certain class, may be more complex and not easily prevented. What then? Much of your college and professional life will be spent solving problems; some will be complex, such as deciding on a career, and require time and effort to come up with a solution.

Others will be small, such as deciding what to eat for lunch, and will allow you to make a quick decision based entirely on your own experience. But, in either case, when coming up with the solution and deciding what to do, follow the same basic steps.

Use your analytical skills. What is the real issue? Why is it a problem? What are the root causes? What kinds of outcomes or actions do you expect to generate to solve the problem? What are some of the key characteristics that will make a good choice: Timing? Availability of tools and materials? For more complex problems, it helps to actually write out the problem and the answers to these questions.

Can you clarify your understanding of the problem by using metaphors to illustrate the issue? Many problems are made up of a series of smaller problems, each requiring its own solution. Can you break the problem into different facets? Use critical thinking to separate facts from opinion in this step. List all your options. Use your creative thinking skills in this phase. Can any of these answers be combined into a stronger solution?

What past or existing solutions can be adapted or combined to solve this problem? The public are clearly sick of being lied to and trust in politicians is plummeting.

One poll found that the British public trust politicians less than estate agents, bankers and journalists. And despite the fact that we now frequently expect lies from those in power, it remains challenging to spot them in real time, especially so if they lie by paltering.

Psychologist Robert Feldman, author of The Liar in Your Life, sees this as worrying both on a personal and on a macro level. Lying can and does clearly serve a devious social purpose.

It can help someone paint a better picture than the truth, or help a politician dodge an uncomfortable question. But it's how human cognition works," says Rogers. Unfortunately, the prevalence of lies might stem from the way we are brought up. Lies play a role in our social interactions from a very young age.

We tell young children about tooth fairies and Santa, or encourage a child to be grateful for an unwanted present. So next time you hear a fact that sounds odd, or someone to be deflecting a question, be aware that what you think is the truth may very well be deceptive.

If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc. Best of BBC Future. The devious art of lying by telling the truth. Share using Email. By Melissa Hogenboom. The line between truth and lies is becoming ever murkier, finds Melissa Hogenboom.

There's even a word for a very different form of lying. I told her that she looked good when I thought that she looked like a blimp.

We want to achieve our narrow objective — [selling a house or car] — but we also want people to see us as ethical and honest. It's unethical and it makes our democracy worse. But it's how human cognition works. If you violate a trust, your victim is apt to seek revenge and others are likely to stop doing business with you, at least under favorable terms. A man or woman with a reputation for fair dealing will prosper. Therefore, profit maximizers are honest. This sounds plausible enough until you look for concrete examples.

Cases that apparently demonstrate the awful consequences of abusing trust turn out to be few and weak, while evidence that treachery can pay seems compelling. Hutton was brought down by its check-kiting fraud. The cost? But what do these fables prove?

Check-kiting was only one manifestation of the widespread mismanagement that plagued Hutton and ultimately caused its demise. Incompetently run companies going under is not news. Considering the low probability of a spill, was skimping on the promised cleanup equipment really a bad business decision at the time it was taken? Compared with the few ambiguous tales of treachery punished, we can find numerous stories in which deceit was unquestionably rewarded.

Philippe Kahn, in an interview with Inc. How much of that is apocryphal? If it had failed, I would have had nowhere else to go. We figured the only way was somehow to convince them to extend us credit terms. What we did was, before the ad salesman came in—we existed in two small rooms, but I had hired extra people so we would look like a busy, venture-backed company—we prepared a chart with what we pretended was our media plan for the computer magazines.

On the chart we had BYTE crossed out. When the salesman arrived, we made sure the phones were ringing and the extras were scurrying around. Further evidence comes from professional sports.

In our study, one respondent cited the case of Rick Pitino, who had recently announced his decision to leave as coach of the New York Knicks basketball team with over three years left on his contract. Pitino was quoted in the New York Times the week before as saying that he never broke a contract.

The stupidity of it all is that they get their way. Compared with the ambiguity of the Hutton and Exxon cases, the clear causality in the Kahn and Pitino cases is striking. Without subterfuge, Borland International would almost certainly have folded. And there is a hard dollar number with lots of zeros in it that professional athletes and coaches gain when they shed a contract.

What of the long term? Does treachery eventually get punished? Nothing in the record suggests it does. The robber barons who promoted them enjoyed great material rewards at the time—and their fortunes survived several generations. Power can be an of effective substitute and for trust. But they continue to prosper. Why do reputation and retaliation fail as mechanisms for enforcing trust? Power—the ability to do others great harm or great good—can induce widespread amnesia, it appears.

Its early deceit is remembered, if at all, as an amusing prank. Prestigious New York department stores, several of our respondents told us, cavalierly break promises to suppliers. You used the wrong carrier.

Financial types have taken control, the merchants are out. I delayed payments an average of 22 days from my predecessor at this kind of amount, and this is what I saved. They have too much power—they screw one guy, and guys are waiting in line to take a shot at them again. Heroic resistance to an oppressive power is the province of the students at Tiananmen Square, not the businessfolk in the capitalist societies the students risk their lives to emulate.

Businesspeople do not stand on principle when it comes to dealing with abusers of power and trust. You have to adjust, we were told. If we dealt only with customers who share our ethical values, we would be out of business. But the deal was so good, I just accepted it, did the best I could, and had the lawyers make triply sure that everything was covered. Sometimes the powerful leave other no choice. The auto parts supplier has to play ball with the Big Three, no matter how badly he or she has been treated in the past or expects to be treated in the future.

Suppliers of fashion goods believe they absolutely have to take a chance on abusive department stores. Power here totally replaces trust. Nevertheless, even those with limited power can live down a poor record of trustworthiness.

To illustrate, consider the angry letters the mail fraud unit of the U. Post Office gets every year from the victims of the fake charities it exposes. They want to avoid information that says they have trusted a fraud. When the expected reward is substantial and avoidance becomes really strong, reference checking goes out the window.

In the eyes of people blinded by greed, the most tarnished reputations shine brightly. Such investors want to believe in the fabulous returns the broker has promised. The search for data that confirm wishful thinking is not restricted to naive medical practitioners dabbling in pork bellies. The Wall Street Journal recently detailed how a year-old conglomerateur perpetrated a gigantic fraud on sophisticated financial institutions such as Citibank, the Bank of New England, and a host of Wall Street firms.

A Salomon Brothers team that conducted due diligence on the wunderkind pronounced him highly moral and ethical. A few months later…. Even with a fully disclosed public record of bad faith, hard-nosed businesspeople will still try to find reasons to trust.

Lured by high yields, junk bond investors choose to believe that their relationship will be different: Wyatt had to break his contracts when energy prices rose; and a junk bond is so much more, well, binding than a mere supply contract. Similarly, we can imagine, every new Pitino employer believes the last has done Pitino wrong.

Their relationship will last forever. Ambiguity and complexity can also take the edge off reputational enforcement. When we trust others to and keep complexity their word, we simultaneously rely on their integrity, native ability, and favorable external circumstances.

So when a trust appears to be breached, there can be so much ambiguity that even the aggrieved parties cannot apprehend what happened. Was the breach due to bad faith, incompetence, or circumstances that made it impossible to perform as promised? No one knows. Yet without such knowledge, we cannot determine in what respect someone has proved untrustworthy: basic integrity, susceptibility to temptation, or realism in making promises.

We own the market. Then the company went on the skids. The funny thing is, afterwards he bought the business back from us, put a substantial amount of his own capital in, and still has not turned it around. He was independently wealthy from another sale anyway, and I think he wanted to prove that he was a great businessman and that we just screwed the business up. If he was a charlatan, why would he have cared? Where even victims have difficulty assessing whether and to what extent someone has broken a trust, it is not surprising that it can be practically impossible for a third party to judge.