Blinded by our own motivations

Many times in our life we are constantly driven by our conflict of interests. Which makes us do things we never wanted to without our conscience. It takes us to do deeper analysis of our act in that instant, to refrain or correct ourselves next time.

Now you might be wondering; what conflict of interest means?

Dan Ariely in his book “The honest truth of dishonesty” unveils how our conflict of interests bias to put us on falsehood. Here’s the anecdote he shared in his book to give us understanding of how our conflict of interests affect us: Dan on this day of his regular consultation with his doctor, I believe he was consulting regularly from his childhood for the burning he had, was advised to tattoo his burned out half-face with the black dots to get the aesthetic symmetry for his face.  But, Dan enquired little bit more about it with his doctor and decided not to tattoo his face. This enraged his Doctor, who said if Dan enjoyed being ugly or liked to get sympathized dating with girls. Astonished by the words used by doctor for the very first time, Dan reached out to his secretary. Secretary epitomized his doctor’s act in that instant saying he had bought this new tattoo machine and wanted one more guy for his experiment to write a paper.

Here the conflict of interest for the doctor was, he had bought this new tattoo machine and wanted to use it just for its sake. So, he started finding reasons out to use it one his patients.

Did you know? When you lend your hand out to help someone, they often feel indebted. They will be biased. Will be driven by conflict of interest to return the help they got by some means. This nature can be found in every-one of us. And is being used by some of us to fetch our needs. Dan gives an example of Pharma representatives to explain this nature. The Pharmaceutical representatives go to every clinic to promote their medicine by being extra nice to the Doctors giving them gift vouchers, arrange the lunch for him and his staffs, give him annually a Trip package for free and so on. With all of this Doctors are obviously under affinity to return the favors by prescribing their medicines to the patients.

More elaborately this can be found in offices, wherein some employees stay very close to the employers showing them the results which was actually done by some other employee. And act to help their employers in all means to get the credits and recognition. Here the employer is blinded by the motivation of returning the favors he got from his employee.

Dan, in his books mentions few remedies to eradicate the conflict of interests, but he finds some loop holes in each of the remedy. He concludes saying when you feel you are driven by the conflict of interest, it is better to take a second opinion from a guy who has no financial/personal stake out of the decision you make.