Building Integrity in the Age of Normalized Cheating

What happens to integrity when cheating becomes easier and the world seems to reward people for cutting corners? In this episode of The Curiosity Shop, Adam shares what happened when he discovered that students were planning to use AI to cheat on an exam. Brené and Adam move into a much larger conversation about honesty, character, and moral identity. Together, they explore when using AI is inherently cheating, why monitoring people isn’t enough to make them trustworthy, the difference between shame and adaptive guilt, and what research reveals about building a stronger moral compass. They also unpack why honor codes can sometimes backfire, how inconsistent accountability undermines trust, and what dimension of character we often overlook. Ultimately, Brené and Adam explore the difference between wanting to be seen as a good person and choosing to become the kind of person who does the right thing even when no one else is watching. There’s Really Only One Way to Stop Students From Cheating – Adam Grant, August 26, 2026, The New York Times Cheating: Why Students Do It and How We Can Help Them Stop – Donald McCabe, 2001, American Educator Brené Brown: The Rage Bucket Theory – Trevor Noah, June 4, 2026, What Now? with Trevor Noah Adam Grant Gives Trevor an Intellectual Wedgie – Trevor Noah, August 2024, What Now? with Trevor Noah Pickleball Line Rules: Calling the Ball “In” or “Out” – PlayPickleball.com, July 31, 2024, YouTube Cheating in the Age of Generative AI: A High School Survey Study of Cheating Behaviors Before and After the Release of ChatGPT – Lee et al., 2024, Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence Addressing Academic Dishonesty in Higher Education: A Systematic Review of Generative AI’s Impact – Sharma & Panja, 2025, Open Praxis As Schools Reconsider Cursive, Research Homes in on Handwriting’s Brain Benefits – Jonathan Lambert, May 11, 2024, NPR How Learning Handwriting Trains the Brain: The Science Behind the Cursive Wars – Mariana Lenharo, February 2, 2026, Nature The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom – Ose Askvik et al., 2020, Frontiers in Psychology Why Cursive Handwriting Is Good for Your Brain – Christopher Bergland, October 2, 2020, Psychology Today The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Functional Brain Development in Pre-Literate Children – James & Engelhardt, 2012, Trends in Neuroscience and Education How Handwriting Trains the Brain – Gwendolyn Bounds, October 5, 2010, The Wall Street Journal The Self-Importance of Moral Identity – Aquino & Reed, 2002, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Does Moral Identity Effectively Predict Moral Behavior? A Meta-Analysis – Hertz & Krettenauer, 2016, Review of General Psychology Competition and Cheating: Investigating the Role of Moral Awareness, Moral Identity, and Moral Elevation – Vadera & Pathki, 2021, Journal of Organizational Behavior Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior – Tangney et al., 2007, Annual Review of Psychology Shame and Guilt – Tangney & Dearing, 2002, Guilford Press Shame, Guilt, and Depressive Symptoms: A Meta-Analytic Review – Kim et al., 2011, Psychological Bulletin Shame v. Guilt – Brené Brown, January 14, 2013, brenebrown.com Protecting Our Attention, Time and Humanity in a World That Won’t Slow Down – Brené Brown, August 20, 2026, The Curiosity Shop with Brené Brown and Adam Grant Effectiveness of Ex Ante Honesty Oaths in Reducing Dishonesty Depends on Content – Zickfeld et al., 2025, Nature Human Behaviour Committed Dishonesty: A Systematic Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Social Commitment on Dishonest Behavior – Zickfeld et al., 2024, Psychological Bulletin Detecting and Preventing Cheating in Exams: Evidence From a Field Experiment – Cagala et al., 2024, Journal of Human Resources The Honor Committee – University of Virginia, honor.virginia.edu Effects of Honor Code Reminders on University Students’ Cheating in Unproctored Exams – Zhao et al., 2023, Contemporary Educational Psychology Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences on Academic Integrity: A Replication and Extension to Modified Honor Code Settings – McCabe et al., 2002, Research in Higher Education Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes and Other Contextual Influences – McCabe & Treviño, 1993, Journal of Higher Education Bicentennial Analysis – UVA Honor Committee, 2019, University of Virginia Culture Is Not the Problem. Tolerated Behaviour Is. – John Amaechi, February 15, 2026, Giant! with John Amaechi Making a Pledge Can Encourage Honest Behavior—If the Wording Is Right – Simon Makin, Scientific American, February 26, 2025, Scientific American "Do or do not. There is no try” - Yoda, The Empire Strikes Back, Screenplay by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan, 1980, [Video] YouTube I Solemnly Swear I’m Up to Good: A Megastudy Investigating the Effectiveness of Honesty Oaths on Curbing Dishonesty – Zickfeld et al., 2024, HAL Preprint Trump Reports Over $1 Billion in Income From Crypto Ventures – TIME, June 30, 2026, TIME Now Available: The President’s and Vice President’s Public Financial Disclosure Reports – U. S. Office of Government Ethics, 2026, U. S. Office of Government Ethics Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act of 2012 – U. S. Congress, 2012, Pub. L. No. 112-105 This Is Your Brain on Drugs – Partnership for a Drug-Free America, 1987, YouTube Project D. A. R. E. Outcome Effectiveness Revisited – West & O’Neal, 2004, American Journal of Public Health New Approaches to Youth Substance Misuse – American Psychological Association, March 2024, Monitor on Psychology Beyond Pleasure and Pain – Higgins, 1997, American Psychologist Self-Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect – Higgins, 1987, Psychological Review Possible Selves – Markus & Nurius, 1986, American Psychologist Unwanted Identities: A Key Variable in Shame–Anger Links and Gender Differences in Shame – Ferguson et al., 2000, Sex Roles Shame Resilience Theory: A Grounded Theory Study on Women and Shame – Brown, 2006, Families in Society The BRAVING Inventory – Brené Brown, brenebrown.com An Integrative Model of Organizational Trust – Mayer et al., 1995, Academy of Management Review The Halo Effect: Evidence for Unconscious Alteration of Judgments – Nisbett & Wilson, 1977, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Integrity Is Choosing Courage Over Comfort – Brené Brown, brenebrown.com The Self-Importance of Moral Identity – Aquino & Reed, 2002, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology The Optics of Lying: How Pursuing an Honest Social Image Shapes Dishonest Behavior – Guzikevits & Choshen-Hillel, 2022, Current Opinion in Psychology Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – James Clear, 2018, Avery Learn more about your ad choices. 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• 1:30Brené Brown?

  Welcome to The Curiosity Shop.

• 1:31Adam Grant?

  A show from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

• 1:40Brené Brown?

  Hey there.

• 1:41Adam Grant?

  Hey, Brene.

• 1:42Brené Brown?

  Just for all of you listening or watching, Adam and I just both finished teaching very intense intensives. So Adam taught an MBA intensive at Wharton. I taught an MBA intensive that just ended like a couple of days ago at University of Texas McCombs. How was it for you? How was your, how intense was your intensive?

• 2:07Adam Grant?

  Exhilarating and exhausting all at once. How about you?

• 2:09Brené Brown?

  Oh, my God, too. It was the paradox of those. And, you know, I just think for the students, I appreciate an intensive because it really allows students to get in, take a course, learn a ton. But I'm starting to wonder about saturation in intensives. Like, what's your thinking on that?

• 2:32Adam Grant?

  I've been wondering about that, too. I love the fact that they're not distracted by other classes and they can go all in on leadership and teamwork. And then I wonder, it's a week, and then they're done. Are they going to forget in a year or two?

• 2:46Brené Brown?

  Yeah, that's interesting. We scheduled some follow-ons, and so we're gonna, we're gonna keep coming back. And I really appreciate it, especially this cohort. It's the first time I've taught this cohort of MBA working professionals. So they have full-time jobs. And it was really nice, especially for, you know, I'm teaching daring leadership, teamwork, and it was so nice to have all the stories about where they're filing those things because some of them were ICs, a lot of them that were people leaders, all of them on teams. So it always like reinvigorates my hope for people when I teach. Do you feel the same way in the classroom?

• 3:21Adam Grant?

  Same, same. I feel like we get to see the best of our students so often and the best of their generation.

• 3:28Brené Brown?

  A hundred percent, yeah. It was great. So interestingly, you just had, let's segue to our topic today. You just had an op-ed hit the New York Times on cheating. And I, I think this has so many implications, not just for the classroom, but for life.

• 3:56Brené Brown?

  Tell me about, I get to interview you a little bit, which I love. Tell me about what you wrote for folks who haven't seen it yet, why you wrote it. The Adam restrained fury is bouncing off the page with this.

• 4:14Adam Grant?

  Did you feel it?

• 4:15Brené Brown?

  I did. I totally felt it.

• 4:18Adam Grant?

  I was, I don't know if I was more shocked or dismayed or morally outraged, but a few years ago, I gave what was gonna be my first take-home final exam in the AI era. And for a long time, I've given my students a really challenging exam because, as I explain it to them, I think what they're learning is important, and I want them to master the material. So there are some very hard multiple choice and short answer questions, and there are also some essay questions. And I wrote the exam as I always do. And the night before, I got these panicked notes from a bunch of students saying, our classmates are planning to cheat.

• 5:05Adam Grant?

  And what they explained to me was that they had built a custom large language model where they ingested all of the course materials, the readings, the PowerPoints, the notes they took. And they were just gonna pull that up and use it to ace the exam.

• 5:21Adam Grant?

  And I feel like I went through the five stages of grief in five minutes there because, Brene, these were students I spent the whole fall trying to do everything I could to support and help. And I just took for granted that they had high moral standards. And I guess that was naive of me. But the idea that they would not only cheat on the course, but also cheat themselves out of learning the material, just, it kind of shook me to my core. And that was the genesis of wanting to tackle this topic.

• 5:56Brené Brown?

  So what did you do? What was your response?

• 6:00Adam Grant?

  I mean, I immediately knew I couldn't give the exam as I'd planned it. You know, originally, I was, I was extra sad because it was supposed to be an in-person exam. And through some stroke of bad luck or good luck, I don't know what, we had the last day. It was, I think, most of my students were gonna be done a week earlier. But then they were gonna have to stay on campus just for my exam. And to accommodate them, I said, fine, we'll just, we'll do, we'll do an online exam. And that was the way they responded, to take advantage of that. So I knew I had to throw out the exam I wrote. When they logged in the next day, they found only essay. There were no multiple choice questions.

• 6:43Adam Grant?

  There were no short answer questions. And the essay that I asked them to write was about cheating. And I said, look, you know, I've, I've heard that some students were planning to cheat. So you just took a whole class on organizational psychology, use course concepts to explain why might students be motivated to cheat? And how could we change that?

• 7:07Brené Brown?

  And?

• 7:09Adam Grant?

  And I got some panicked notes from students afterward saying, this is not what I studied for. You, you broke the contract. And I said, I don't think I'm the one who broke the contract. I think some of your classmates were planning to, from what I've heard. And I don't want to penalize anyone. So I will, I'll give everybody a shot at writing these, you know, these, these responses. But I thought, Brene, I thought what I was gonna see was a handful of students would rationalize cheating in their responses. And I thought those would potentially be the cheaters.

• 7:52Adam Grant?

  And everybody else would tell me how upsetting it is that students would do this, and it's not the norm. And what I got back was night and day different from that.

• 8:04Brené Brown?

  What'd you get back?

• 8:06Adam Grant?

  You're just gonna make me tell it all, aren't you?

• 8:08Brené Brown?

  I'm gonna make you take it, yeah, yeah, because.

• 8:12Adam Grant?

  So sad.

• 8:14Brené Brown?

  Yeah. What did you get back?

• 8:16Adam Grant?

  All right, well, the students who said cheating is wrong were in the minority.

• 8:21Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 8:22Adam Grant?

  Most of the students made excuses. They said, well, you know, an Ivy League school is a pressure cooker. And we're just, we're stressed. And everyone cheats. And so it's like, it was almost like they were Major League Baseball players during the doping era. And they just said, look, you gotta use ChatGPT as your performance-enhancing drug.

• 8:45Brené Brown?

  This is how you win. I didn't make the rules, I'm just winning, yeah.

• 8:49Adam Grant?

  Exactly. This is a broken system, and we are doing what we need to do to survive in it. And I was just appalled that there was no mention in a lot of the essays of integrity. There was no, there wasn't even in a lot of cases any guilt or shame about cheating, which historically even cheaters felt,

• 9:10Adam Grant?

  which I want to talk to you about. Shame expert.

• 9:14Brené Brown?

  Yeah, no. As you can imagine, prepping for our conversation, I've read your op-ed like three times, four times. I've underlined it. I've done all the things I do when I really want to understand something.

• 9:28Brené Brown?

  And I'm conflicted. I'm really conflicted.

• 9:32Adam Grant?

  Tell me why.

• 9:34Brené Brown?

  I don't know. It's like I'm nervous. It's like, it's on, when I was,

• 9:40Brené Brown?

  when I, we've both recently done a podcast with Trevor Noah. And when I was on it, I was thinking, you know, sometimes I'd love to get on a podcast and just think aloud. And then I'm really scared to do that because then it'll be clipped and it'll be me sounding like, you know, that I'm certain about things. But I think I am genuinely conflicted about,

• 10:04Brené Brown?

  I'm not conflicted at all about cheating. Oh, God, I hate cheating. Like, you have no idea. I mean, like, I'm a number one on the Enneagram. I, there is no, there's, I can't stand it.

• 10:17Brené Brown?

  I'm not conflicted about cheating. I'm conflicted about your students. Like, part of me is thinking, wow, they are gonna be the captains of industry, building an LLM, feeding it all the right things, using all the correct prompts, lots of innovation and ingenuity. Is that, you know, is it cheating? I don't, yes, I think so. I don't know. I am conflicted about,

• 10:47Brené Brown?

  is AI used cheating? Do we need to be teaching students today how to use AI without losing their own sense of discernment and critical thinking? I'm not sure that I am anti or for. I just don't, I agree that cheating is bad.

• 11:12Brené Brown?

  I mean, I just, I just couldn't cheat. Yeah, I don't know. But I, I can get morally superior very quickly. I do think there's a lack of integrity.

• 11:26Brené Brown?

  And I'm wondering if we're testing for the right things.

• 11:30Adam Grant?

  Oh, well, that raises a lot of questions. I want to pick up on one thing you said.

• 11:34Brené Brown?

  Okay.

• 11:34Adam Grant?

  Which is, I can get morally superior very quickly.

• 11:39Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Adam Grant?

  You say that as if it's a risk and you're trying to avoid it. But here, I actually think it's a benefit. And I think part of the problem is, that's missing. Like, where is the, where is the sense of honor and integrity around, okay, I'm supposed to learn this material. I'm lying and saying that I didn't, and I'm okay with that. How do you look in the mirror at night? How do you feel like you earned a transcript with a grade on it that is work you did not produce yourself? I want students to be more self-righteous about that.

• 12:21Brené Brown?

  I mean, I couldn't because it would make me physically ill.

• 12:26Brené Brown?

  It would make me physically ill. It was interesting. I was playing pickleball yesterday. And there was a ball that I called, you know, our opponents hit a ball and it was a really great ball. And my partner and I looked at each other about the call. And I said, I think we call it in. It was too close. And it was interesting because he said, on a tournament, I would have called it out.

• 12:52Brené Brown?

  And I was like,

• 12:52Adam Grant?

  Wow.

• 12:53Brené Brown?

  As the rest of the open play went, I had heard it two or three more times. Man, tournament call, I would have called that out. So I called my friend Chaz, who was actually my CFO. And we've known each other for 30 years. And I said, what is this new language I'm hearing? And he said, oh, it's kind of people saying, I'll call it in. But in a high stakes situation, I was gonna, I'd probably call that out. And then he paused for a second and he was like, you would hate that shit. And I was said, yeah, because

• 13:21Adam Grant?

  It's wrong.

• 13:22Brené Brown?

  If it's too close to call, whether the stakes are high or low.

• 13:25Adam Grant?

  Shouldn't matter.

• 13:26Brené Brown?

  You call the ball in. You don't call the ball out. That's just being a good sport, a good opponent, a good competitor.

• 13:33Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Brené Brown?

  But I think the downside is,

• 13:39Brené Brown?

  no, there's no downside for me, actually. I was gonna say, the downside for some people is, they could feel like a schmuck. Like, I'm the only, I have this set of rules that I'm following that no one else is following. And that makes me a schmuck. I don't feel like that. But yeah, I'd rather lose a thousand times over than cheat.

• 13:58Adam Grant?

  Same, same. I got my, not long ago, I got access to my college recommendation letters. And I was just curious about what was in them. And I didn't even remember, but recently, I discovered my college recommendation letters. And my physics teacher wrote that I was a rare student of high integrity because I not only reported an incident of cheating that I observed, but I helped him design a system to prevent it moving forward. And I was, I had no idea that, I was like, of course, everyone would do that. And I remember talking to, I guess, a fellow nerd about it.

• 14:43Adam Grant?

  And he said, I don't see anything wrong with cheating. And I said, what do you mean? How could you not see anything wrong with cheating? You've aced so many tests. And he said, yeah, I don't cheat because I don't have to. Not because I don't see a problem with it. And I remember just being disgusted. And now I feel like this is increasingly a stance among students.

• 15:08Brené Brown?

  I think it's true. I think it is.

• 15:12Adam Grant?

  Why? Why is it happening? It seems like in part, it's just the stakes have gone up and the difficulty has gone down.

• 15:21Brené Brown?

  Yeah, but I mean, like, look outside. Like, every leader, with very few exceptions, around the world, corruption, coercion, you know, like, do you see a lot of people getting ahead by how we measure getting ahead? I mean, are you seeing billionaires with, that are, you know, really embracing progressive labor movements among their employees? Or, you know, are they squashing? I mean, like, I just think, like, I don't know. I don't, the payoff has got to be internal.

• 16:04Brené Brown?

  And

• 16:05Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 16:06Brené Brown?

  And I don't even know that I feel that way about cheating because I feel good about myself when I'm honest or that I can't live with the consequences of doing it. And I don't know which is which, and it's maybe a little bit of both, but like,

• 16:22Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 16:23Brené Brown?

  Um, I don't know. What I also see is in high-pressure competitive academic environments or high-pressure work environments,

• 16:36Brené Brown?

  the leadership,

• 16:39Brené Brown?

  for the most part, sends the messaging, win by all

• 16:44Adam Grant?

  Costs.

• 16:44Brené Brown?

  Means necessary. And if you win by dubious means, that's almost called innovation and ingenuity these days. So I don't know. I feel like we're, I don't know. I feel like, are we like cognitive

• 17:03Brené Brown?

  fuddy-duddies who have succeeded in systems that, to some degree, were built for us to succeed? And now we're in situations and, you know, systems where not everyone is, they're not built for everyone to succeed. And people are seeing the whole world rewarded.

• 17:26Brené Brown?

  Let me ask a question, and I want you to suspend disbelief to answer it a little bit, which I know you're gonna hate.

• 17:34Adam Grant?

  Bring it.

• 17:35Brené Brown?

  Student A and student B, take your class.

• 17:39Brené Brown?

  And student A follows all the rules, zero cheating, would turn somebody in who cheats, you know, is that person? And student B is gonna build the LLM, use AI. And in a year, when you test them, they have the same degree of mastery from your course. They're the same. Are you upset because of the morality of cheating? Or are you upset because cheating threatens mastery?

• 18:17Adam Grant?

  Both.

• 18:18Brené Brown?

  No pause.

• 18:19Adam Grant?

  Both. No pause. It's, there's, I have a principled objection, which is, it's just wrong. You can't

• 18:28Brené Brown?

  Did you tell them they couldn't build an LLM?

• 18:31Adam Grant?

  Oh, of course. It was a closed book exam. So it was supposed to be an in-person proctored exam.

• 18:37Brené Brown?

  Got it. Okay.

• 18:38Adam Grant?

  And I let them do it online instead. And yeah, they definitely know that, they knew, they were very clear on the fact that it would not be allowable to Google an answer, let alone to use AI to get an answer.

• 18:54Brené Brown?

  You know, if we take this from classroom to work, there's something interesting. There was a quote in here that I think a student wrote you that I see at work all the time.

• 19:05Adam Grant?

  Ooh, tell me.

• 19:05Brené Brown?

  Someone in your survey, yeah, someone in your survey wrote, cheating is a creative expression in a form of problem solving. If you can get around the restrictions put in place and not get caught, then good on you.

• 19:18Adam Grant?

  Yep.

• 19:19Brené Brown?

  There's not a part of you that's like, let me think about that.

• 19:22Adam Grant?

  Nope. Not at all. Nope. It's wrong. And it's also, in a lot of situations, it's gonna be long-run counterproductive. But for your thought experiment, even if it weren't, I would still say it's wrong. You are, you are accepting a grade you did not earn. You're taking credit for a result that you did not generate. Not okay with me.

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• 21:50Brené Brown?

  Okay, so you're proposing a solution in your op-ed that I really want to get into.

• 21:57Adam Grant?

  Me too.

• 21:58Brené Brown?

  Okay, talk about what you found.

• 22:00Adam Grant?

  This brings us to the other, the other reason that I wanted to write this, is I think that the problem is, is more severe than I thought it was. But also, I don't think we're talking about the right solutions. Because when I hear my colleagues who teach classes, and when I talk with university presidents about how to stop cheating, it's all about proctoring. They've said, okay, we're gonna, you know, we're not writing papers anymore. We're going back to Blue Book writing, because we want to be able to observe and make sure it's really yours. Take-home assignments are more and more problematic, and so we're just gonna watch everything. You can't monitor everything. That's not the solution.

• 22:39Brené Brown?

  No.

• 22:40Adam Grant?

  Just not doable, right?

• 22:41Brené Brown?

  I mean, God almighty, if I have to grade Blue Books again, I'm retiring.

• 22:45Adam Grant?

  Yeah, we got, we got rid of cursive for a reason.

• 22:48Brené Brown?

  Ah!

• 22:49Adam Grant?

  Or at least, I, I, I can't write in cursive anymore. You probably love it, don't you?

• 22:56Brené Brown?

  Yes, and the science proves it. How could you be against the science selectively about cursive?

• 23:03Adam Grant?

  I don't think I know the science on cursive, tell me.

• 23:05Brené Brown?

  Oh my God, I'm gonna look it up before this is over.

• 23:08Adam Grant?

  I know handwriting is better than typing.

• 23:09Brené Brown?

  And cursing is, cursive is better than cursing and cursive. That is, that is the most powerful.

• 23:14Adam Grant?

  You're here for both.

• 23:16Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Adam Grant?

  This is.

• 23:18Brené Brown?

  I am.

• 23:19Adam Grant?

  That's a Freudian slip, Brene style.

• 23:21Brené Brown?

  Yeah, I, I believe in cursing and cursive, you bet, in equal measure. I will find that research for you and put it in the show notes. But, yeah, I can't grade Blue Books anymore. Like, that, that ship has sailed. Um, but, okay, so if, if we're not proctoring everything, which I, I do think, I hear a lot of my colleagues going toward, I'm gonna watch you, I'm gonna watch you produce, which, oh my God, y'all, y'all know that's not gonna translate to work environments, right? So, okay, so what do you think?

• 23:53Adam Grant?

  It's not feasible. And also, do we really want to just accept, we're raising a generation of, of students who are not trustworthy, and we're just gonna throw our hands up and say we give up?

• 24:03Brené Brown?

  No.

• 24:04Adam Grant?

  We, we either monitor them, or, no, we're not gonna do that. So, I, I've spent a bunch of time thinking about this, you know, did a deep dive into the research on, what do we know about what else prevents cheating? And the answer that came out again and again in the data is identity. It's the point that you made earlier, Brene, that it's gotta come from within. If we can't create a, a permanent system of monitoring or reward and punishment externally, then we're looking at internal motivation. And in the research on cheating, I think there's, there's a whole set of studies that I think captures it really well, which is, the basic finding is, across a set of experiments,

• 24:45Adam Grant?

  when you raise the stakes of getting a good grade or acing a quiz, cheating goes up, because people want the reward and they're willing to cut corners to get it. Except there are some people who aren't more likely to cheat when the stakes go up. And those are people with strong moral identities, who have internalized a sense of honor and integrity. And I think, as you were suggesting earlier, they both feel good when they do the right thing, and they also feel awful if they even consider doing the wrong thing. And that both fear of being a bad person and desire to be a good person is enough

• 25:26Adam Grant?

  to get them to resist whatever temptation they feel, not only to cheat, but also to lie, or steal, or do anything else unethical. And I think I came away from this, believing that we have essentially abandoned the idea of instilling a moral identity in our students, and maybe in our children too. And that's a mistake.

• 25:47Brené Brown?

  And how, what are, what does the research say about the best way to instill moral identity? I know it's not shame, and I know it's not attaching someone's moral identity to their sense of self-worth, um, that if you, if you engage in these behaviors that are dishonest, you're a terrible person. I don't think that works. So what does the research tell us is the right way to increase moral identity?

• 26:23Adam Grant?

  Well, this is, this is exactly what I wanted to ask you. How confident are you that a little bit of shame isn't helpful here? Because I think at least anticipated shame is one of the, the common experiences of people with strong moral identity. Like, I think, and maybe, maybe shame is the, is the wrong flavor of it, but when I heard you say a moment ago, I would feel, I feel physically ill at the thought of doing this. Isn't there shame attached to the idea of saying, if I were to cheat, I would, I would have a view of myself that is, you know, like, I would come to think of myself as a bad person, and so I can't even contemplate that?

• 27:04Brené Brown?

  No, so for me, that would not be shame. That would be, and, and again, I think if you look at the correlation between shame and behaviors like aggression, violence, outcomes like addiction, depression, I think shame is far too blunt of an instrument.

• 27:25Adam Grant?

  Yep.

• 27:26Brené Brown?

  What I would feel, what I could anticipatorily feel if I cheated, is guilt, and the cognitive dissonance of engaging in a behavior that's different than who I want to be and how I see myself. So the sickening feeling for me is cognitive dissonance. Um, there's a lack of alignment between who I believe I am and who I say I am and a behavior I just engaged in, which is kind of classic adaptive guilt. Now, in these studies, I wouldn't be surprised if they use terms like anticipatory shame, because I don't think a lot of researchers spend a lot of time teasing out shame, guilt, humiliation, and embarrassment.

• 28:02Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 28:03Brené Brown?

  But the reason why I think guilt is more helpful here, is it doesn't seem like, based on your survey of your students, that shame is a mediating variable, making them feel bad. So I think if you are really talking about moral identity, what moral identity I believe does is creates cognitive dissonance when we act outside of who we think we are and who we say we are. And I think that's adaptive guilt.

• 28:33Adam Grant?

  I think that's exactly right. See, you didn't need to ask me that question. You knew the answer.

• 28:39Brené Brown?

  No, but I do think, I think there's a lot of questions embedded in that, because, you know, we could take this into an arena that's really, for us, if, do you say you watched a film when you watched the trailer and a few snippets on, on social? Do you do an interview on a podcast with an author if you haven't read every word of, of the book, or, or whatever? You know, like, do we think students are reading every word of assigned reading? And if they don't read, let me tell you something, as a PhD student, we had 1,500, 2,000 pages sometimes a week that we had to read. I read for utility. Like, I read for utility.

• 29:22Brené Brown?

  And if a professor looked at me and said, did you do the readings? I'm gonna say, I don't know what I would have said, but I probably would have said yes, because I read them for utility, and I, I'm prepared to answer any question you have for me.

• 29:34Adam Grant?

  Quiz me.

• 29:35Brené Brown?

  Quiz me, quiz me. But quiz me, mother trucker, is different than, it's still, I probably said, yes, I read. And so, so where's my line? You know? And so what I'm wondering about is, are we talking about cheaters versus, you know, cheating and not cheating, dishonesty and honesty? Are we talking about moral ambiguity?

• 30:03Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 30:04Brené Brown?

  And what role do we have in saying, let me tell you what's not ambiguous in this course and what's ambiguous? If you wanna read the book, you read the book any way you want, but I'm gonna take full authority to quiz you on any part of it that I want to.

• 30:22Adam Grant?

  I love that framing of it. Yeah.

• 30:26Brené Brown?

  You know, and if, and if I say, here's what I need, I always tell my students, because I think this is true, I have signed a contract, a legal contract with this university, saying that I'm gonna cover this information, and that upon successful completion of this course, I can almost, you know, promise the university that you understand the following things.

• 30:49Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Brené Brown?

  And I take that obligation super seriously. So if at the end of the class, I feel like they have mastered that material, am I overly invested in how? I'm just asking, I don't know, I don't know the answer.

• 31:12Adam Grant?

  No, I don't, I don't think you should be.

• 31:13Brené Brown?

  I'm grappling.

• 31:14Adam Grant?

  But when you can no longer gauge whether they've mastered the material or not, because they may just be copying their answers from an AI tool, then, then you have a problem.

• 31:27Brené Brown?

  I gotta be honest with you, like, this is a hard conversation. And I feel like this at work too, sometimes. Do you ever get to the point where you're just like, screw it? I have a piece of the course that's self-graded. And I can always predict the students who are gonna be harsher on themselves and more probably appropriately evaluative, and those who are just gonna give themselves the straight highest grade. And I don't fight them because if that's the way you choose to live your life, I'm gonna spend zero interest and energy on that. If you come to me, however, for a recommendation on anything, zero chance, and I'll tell you exactly why I'm not gonna give it to you.

• 32:05Adam Grant?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, same.

• 32:08Brené Brown?

  Yeah, you scored yourself a 10 out of 10 on a rubric where there was no way you got a 10 because it would have been observable by me in the classroom because it was this kind of sharing or that kind of sharing. So if you're good with that, I'm not babysitting your morality here. Great. But don't come to me for anything.

• 32:29Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I think that's a reasonable stance. I think I've had to have conversations with students before where I've said, I don't think I'm in the best position to write you the letter full of detailed glowing praise

• 32:43Brené Brown?

  For sure.

• 32:44Adam Grant?

  that I'm sure you're seeking. And so I would recommend asking someone else.

• 32:48Brené Brown?

  If I can't write you, if it doesn't say, I fully recommend Adam Grant for this position without any reservations, please call me on my cellphone if you have any questions. If I can't write that, I don't write your letter of recommendation. I just tell you, I think you'll be able to find a stronger one somewhere else.

• 33:06Adam Grant?

  That's generally my position too. And, you know, interestingly, I think that's an expression of moral identity for both of us.

• 33:15Brené Brown?

  That for sure is, because I, yeah.

• 33:17Adam Grant?

  I'm not gonna force someone on somebody else who I can't vouch for.

• 33:22Brené Brown?

  Yeah, I think that's true. I wonder if it'd be helpful for people listening or watching, it'd be helpful for me if we bucket what we're talking about, because we're sliding into related areas that are different. And so I wanna be really clear about cheating. Well, maybe this is the discussion we're having, I don't know it, but cheating to me is an act of behavior of breaking agreed-upon rules for your benefit.

• 34:00Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 34:01Brené Brown?

  I find no moral ambiguity in that whatsoever.

• 34:04Adam Grant?

  Nope. Very clear.

• 34:06Brené Brown?

  Yeah, very clear to me. Using whatever your methodologies are that are within the confines of the rules to varying degrees, read it all by word, read summaries, get a spark note, whatever, and being willing to be held accountable for mastery of the material, I'm actually okay with.

• 34:26Adam Grant?

  Same.

• 34:29Brené Brown?

  AI does not always equate to cheating for me. So it's really about, and this was in actually the AMA we did for the Curiosity Shop, why I'm seeing trust implode on teams right now. Because they haven't gone through an exercise as a team of saying, here's what's okay for AI use in our team, and here's what's not okay. Just two columns. You know, you can use it for background information, you cannot use it for discernment. You have to let us know when you use it, you can't use it and not disclose when it's being used. You know, like those kind of just basic rules.

• 35:09Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 35:10Brené Brown?

  So it sounds like we're pretty much aligned.

• 35:14Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I think we are.

• 35:16Brené Brown?

  The only place where I'm unsure is, tell me about the research in the op-ed where, what was effective teaching of ethical awareness and what wasn't? Some pretty big studies.

• 35:35Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Brené Brown?

  What did you learn?

• 35:36Adam Grant?

  Yeah, I mean, the data are powerful here. And I actually, I think this goes to the question of, let's go to the next level of how do you actually develop a moral identity or activate a moral identity?

• 35:48Brené Brown?

  Okay.

• 35:48Adam Grant?

  Because I think you captured it beautifully when you said, I don't want shame, I might want some adaptive guilt. But how do we cultivate that? So let's just do a quick walkthrough of what we know. There have been a whole series of experiments where you try to use an honor code or an honesty pledge, and the results are inconsistent. Sometimes you see a reduction in cheating, sometimes you see no effect, sometimes you actually see an increase in cheating. And the experiment that really stopped me in my tracks on this showed that if you ask students to sign an honesty pledge before an exam, the rate of cheating doubled.

• 36:31Brené Brown?

  Is the messaging, wow, everybody's doing this, this is why we have to sign it, so it's normalizing it?

• 36:37Adam Grant?

  Exactly, yeah. It seems to be that if you're not careful, when you ask everybody to sign an oath saying, I'm gonna do the right thing, you're implicitly messaging, you know what? Everybody's cheating. And then students assume, well, I guess it's normal.

• 36:55Brené Brown?

  Table stakes.

• 36:57Adam Grant?

  Yeah. So that does not work well.

• 37:01Brené Brown?

  Wait, can I stop you here? Can I stop here and ask a question?

• 37:03Adam Grant?

  Yeah, please.

• 37:04Brené Brown?

  What do we know about these? Or do we know, I think of some universities pop into my mind right off the bat that have very strong, kind of, that's part of their marketing material. Do we know anything from those universities? Am I right in saying like UVA has a really big one? What do we know from those? Anything from university-wide honor codes?

• 37:24Adam Grant?

  Don't know. It's a really good question. I think they're hard to study in a controlled way because they're so embedded in the institution that you don't really have a control group. And so let's say UVA has a great honor code, and they also seem to have lower rates of cheating than other schools. Is it because you attracted students who cared about integrity and they wanted to be UVA students? Is it that you've actually changed their behavior in some way through the code? For me, the jury's out. Do you have any sense of it?

• 37:56Brené Brown?

  I don't have a sense of it, but this is where I think shit goes bad very quickly, is the enforcement of honor codes randomly and enforcing those honor codes and letting some folks a privilege slide.

• 38:13Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 38:13Brené Brown?

  So unequal enforcement based on identity and power, I think, is the fastest stake through the heart of any kind of trust, honor code, ethic, is when the accountability is unevenly applied and when privilege and power are mediating variables around accountability. That is so problematic to me. And again, I'm not, I mean, I'm just, I've seen that over and over. And so when we're like, hey, we have these rules and we're gonna enforce them only against groups that have no access to power and our end system's not built for them.

• 38:55Brené Brown?

  So I just, I've never seen persuasive data on what we're talking about. So I think it's interesting that you haven't either. So let's just keep going. What else? What have you seen?

• 39:07Adam Grant?

  I am with you there. And you're reminding me of John Amici's definition of culture. He says, "Culture is the worst behavior tolerated."

• 39:16Brené Brown?

  I mean, that's it.

• 39:17Adam Grant?

  If you let students because daddy or mommy is rich, or because they are an athlete, if you let them get away with things that others wouldn't, guess what? You don't have a culture of integrity.

• 39:32Brené Brown?

  No.

• 39:32Adam Grant?

  You're choosing to tolerate that behavior.

• 39:35Brené Brown?

  Yeah, and in those systems, it's Fight Club, baby. Like, it's everybody for themselves because that's what you've built.

• 39:47Adam Grant?

  And it's a culture of silence, too. What's the first rule of Fight Club?

• 39:50Brené Brown?

  Yeah, no Fight Club.

• 39:52Adam Grant?

  We don't talk about Fight Club.

• 39:53Brené Brown?

  Right.

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• 41:57Brené Brown?

  Okay, so what was effective? Are there effective ways to increase or change moral identity or build it?

• 42:05Adam Grant?

  So I think in terms of activating it, assuming that everybody has some degree of it. Some people hold it more strongly than others. There was an experiment with over 20,000 people, which basically reduced cheating by reminding students of the moral implications of their actions. And there were a few different ways to do this that I thought were interesting. One that I never would have thought of was to disrupt the tendency to compartmentalize.

• 42:33Brené Brown?

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:34Adam Grant?

  We've all seen people say, well, you know, I did this. But that little instance of cheating, no, that doesn't make me a cheater. Or, you know what? Everybody's doing this and therefore it's not really cheating. The way to interrupt that tendency was to give students a pledge that said, I understand that honesty is an all or nothing concept. In other words, you're either honest or you're not. And you confront that and you say, huh, I can't cheat a little and say, but I'm not a cheater because I'm either honest or I'm cheating and I've got to choose. I thought that was clever. What did you think of that one?

• 43:12Brené Brown?

  I mean, it's very Yoda.

• 43:14Adam Grant?

  Do or do not, there is no try.

• 43:16Brené Brown?

  Right, I mean, do or do not, right?

• 43:19Adam Grant?

  Do or do not.

• 43:21Brené Brown?

  Yeah, that's, god dang, that was good.

• 43:24Adam Grant?

  Was it? I don't know, I need to work on my Yoda impression.

• 43:26Brené Brown?

  No, it's really good. Yeah, I think, I think there's a potential backlash, but let's keep going.

• 43:33Adam Grant?

  Okay, so a second way to activate moral identity or appeal to it was to remind students of just a deep-seated sense of justice and fairness that maybe, maybe they subscribe to in the abstract, but they hadn't linked it to, well, what am I going to do on this exam? And the way of doing that was to ask them to sign a statement that said, I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. That one spoke to me because I think that got, for me, it got right to the heart of, but you are then, you're claiming a reward that you did not earn.

• 44:13Brené Brown?

  I don't know, I, I just see when you say those statements, just to be honest with you, I just see how people could dismantle them in a microsecond.

• 44:26Adam Grant?

  Tell me.

• 44:27Brené Brown?

  So say the statement again.

• 44:29Adam Grant?

  Okay, so the statement is, I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve.

• 44:36Brené Brown?

  Yeah, and there's nobody in here getting anything that they deserve. This place is so screwed up, the system is so screwed up. No one is getting what they deserve, except for a couple of people. And I'm going to get exactly what I deserve by any means necessary in a system that's completely flawed. And how much cryptocurrency does the president deserve during a presidency? And how much, and on both sides of the aisle, how much early insider trading does anyone who's an elected representative deserve? Like, we're not in a system, I mean, I can just see.

• 45:09Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 45:10Brené Brown?

  And the worst thing is, again, I don't want to be the proponent for cheating in this conversation because I'm not built for it. But when systems are corrupt and bankrupt, it makes it so hard.

• 45:22Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 45:23Brené Brown?

  Like, for me, the sentence that would work, so we've got, I understand that honesty is an all or nothing concept. I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. The last one got to me. Do you want to read the last one?

• 45:37Adam Grant?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah, this is, this is the one that I found least compelling. It's so interesting that it's the one that spoke to you.

• 45:43Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Adam Grant?

  Wait, before we go to it, I just want to say one thing on the fraudulent one. I think you're right that a lot of people can rationalize it by saying, hey, but everybody around me is getting something they don't deserve. Why not me too? I wonder if that's why it's not more effective. It is one of the most effective statements that's been tested, but there's still a lot of noise in that effect. And I wonder if it would be better if there's an addition to it that goes something along the lines of this. I understand that dishonesty is a fraudulent way of getting something I don't deserve. I recognize that there are people who have gotten where they are through that and I don't want to contribute to that system. I don't want to be part of that system because I believe in creating something fair and just and better.

• 46:29Brené Brown?

  So now we're in my.

• 46:30Adam Grant?

  Does that work better for you?

• 46:31Brené Brown?

  It does, because now we're in my third one.

• 46:32Adam Grant?

  Because that goes to the third one, right?

• 46:33Brené Brown?

  Yes. My third one is, I recognize my honesty fosters a culture of trust, mutual respect and social responsibility, inspiring others to act with integrity. So I am going to be much more, I am going to be the person, you know, if I see the just say no, or this is your brain on drugs, I'm like, yeah. Shut up.

• 46:56Adam Grant?

  Those worked on me. That's so funny.

• 46:58Brené Brown?

  Oh, did they? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. But if I saw something from like more of the social positive marketing, hey, 70% of the students on this campus do not do drugs. I'd be like, oh, wait, I want to belong. I wonder if it's easy to dismantle, again, work, home, cheating on partners, whatever, whatever the dishonesty is.

• 47:27Brené Brown?

  I wonder if there are some of us that are motivated by who we don't want to be.

• 47:31Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 47:32Brené Brown?

  And some of us motivated, I'm going to tie this to shame research. It's really interesting. Some of us motivated by who we don't want to be. And some of us motivated more by who we absolutely want to be.

• 47:48Brené Brown?

  Does that make sense?

• 47:49Adam Grant?

  It does. It reminds me of the Tori Higgins research on self-discrepancy theory and how there are ideal and ought selves. And, or we could go to Hazel Marcus and say, hopeful versus feared possible selves. Which one is stronger? And my hunch is, although I haven't seen good data on this, my hunch is that in general, the prevention avoidance messaging is more effective in the realm of cheating than the promotion approach. Because you can still feel like a good person in other ways. Whereas if, if you do this and that makes you think you might have done something wrong, there's no way around that.

• 48:33Brené Brown?

  It's interesting. I don't know. I think when I go to Tamara Ferguson's research on unwanted identity and how the quintessential elicitor of shame is unwanted identity. I do not want to be perceived as. And then when we ask people to list those, they can, they can list those very quickly. I don't want to be perceived as, you know, they can list a million things, not good enough, ugly, you know, you could do a thousand.

• 48:58Adam Grant?

  Unintelligent.

• 48:59Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 49:00Adam Grant?

  Unkind, yep.

• 49:01Brené Brown?

  But to really understand shame in our lives and how it operates, we also have to understand it is critically important to me that I am perceived as.

• 49:14Brené Brown?

  And so a lot of times we'll unearth things there that don't come up. They're not always the opposite of what comes up. Like, you know, I want to be, I don't want to be perceived as not smart. It's important to me that I'm perceived as smart. We don't see that as much as we see just these kind of random things. And for me, I don't know if it's because I feel more control over how I'm perceived rather than how I, you know, I don't want to be perceived because I can't control that. But I can act in ways, I don't know. I think this is very, very much points to.

• 49:57Brené Brown?

  Okay, can I just take us on a non sequitur for work?

• 50:00Adam Grant?

  Yes, please.

• 50:03Brené Brown?

  So one of the things that we learned in the Dare to Lead research was how difficult it is to bring folks in on one-on-ones to talk about trust. And, you know, and what do we mean when we mean trust? And how do we define trust? And what is trust? And so we came up with the acronym BRAVING for trust. Boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault or confidentiality, integrity, which is where this would fall.

• 50:33Adam Grant?

  Yep.

• 50:33Brené Brown?

  Non-judgment and generosity or assumption of positive intent. So these are the seven elements of trust that we train and teach and we measure.

• 50:44Brené Brown?

  Boundaries, reliability, accountability, vault, integrity, non-judgment and generosity.

• 50:52Brené Brown?

  There is some debate, especially in the practice community around trust. So let's say I work for you, you bring me in and we're doing our once a quarter kind of trust check in on braving, which is what we encourage people to do so that trust conversations are not weird. Here's where I think we're strong. Here's where we could work together. Some people think that the trust score is an average of all of those. So I give you five points out of one, you know, but some people believe it's the product. And if any of them are a zero, then you don't trust somebody at all. Why did you say, why'd you say nope so fast?

• 51:29Adam Grant?

  Well, I said no, in part because they don't all have equal weights, but also there are some dimensions that that drive it to zero. If you fail on them.

• 51:37Brené Brown?

  Say more.

• 51:38Adam Grant?

  That depends on the task, though, and what you have to trust the person to do, right?

• 51:41Brené Brown?

  Yeah. So yeah, I'm coming to the conclusion that I do believe that trust can be dimensional, that I can count you, I can count on you around reliability and accountability. You're delivering on time, you're delivering good deliverables, but I don't really trust you on vault. I don't share confidential things with you because I know that you're a spreader of, you like social capital. So you're always running around, yeah, telling people shit that you shouldn't, you know. And so I kind of believe that you can have high levels of dimension. I don't know if you can have any zeros. I haven't decided yet.

• 52:16Adam Grant?

  I, yeah, I mean, it's so interesting. I love your seven dimensions and they capture fault is a missing dimension of trust in, in my world of, of management and organizational psychology, where trust breaks down to integrity, benevolence, ability, and sometimes reliability. Wait a minute, I guess, I guess that's just lumped under integrity is another facet of it, but it's, it's a different phenomenon because we all know high integrity people that would not cheat, for example, but are very comfortable sharing information that's confidential with others. And when we study this, what I've seen in our data is when people form a positive impression of you on one dimension of trust, they tend to assume that you're trustworthy on all the others.

• 52:59Brené Brown?

  Yes.

• 52:59Adam Grant?

  Until, until something happens that bites them. And all of a sudden they realize, oh, no. And then sometimes they overreact and just decide you're not trustworthy, period. But I think the more nuanced reaction is exactly what you said, which is, oh, I now know I can trust you to do this, but not that.

• 53:17Brené Brown?

  What's interesting too about vault that really freaks people out. I mean, every time we teach this, which is all the time, I just taught it in the MBA program. So this, I'll give you, we'll do a little role play. You call me into the office and we're doing our trust kind of audit once, a couple of times a year, which I love because that means we can have really explicit conversations about trust. They're not, you know, we're naming it, we're talking about the importance of building trust, we're talking about the dimensions of trust. And you say, where I think we're really struggling right now, Brene, is vault. And I said, you know what, Adam, I don't get it. You share highly confidential proprietary things with me all

• 53:56Brené Brown?

  the time. And I have not once shared any of those things with anybody. And then you say, I know, but you often come in here and share things with me that are not yours to share.

• 54:12Brené Brown?

  And that's when like a whole group of people, when I explain that go, wait, what?

• 54:17Adam Grant?

  Yep.

• 54:17Brené Brown?

  And then I said, you know, raise your hand if you want to be on the receiving end of really good gossip for cheese me. Everybody's like, yes. And I said, and raise your hand when that person leaves your office, if you trust them less. Everybody raises their hand and they're like, oh my God, the other side of the vault. It's not just that you'll keep what I share with you confidential, it's that you don't share things with me that are not yours to share. You know, and so, yeah, but so misunderstood. Do you know what I mean? It's like, we just don't talk about both of those sides. And it's interesting because

• 54:54Brené Brown?

  in teams where someone has shared, you know, I've, I've received that feedback before, that I share too much, especially with my boss. I'll get under like, tell me what's driving it. When you do it and it feel, and how does it feel? It feels great. It feels like I'm being helpful. And then we talk about social capital and we talk about, you know, the awkward situation that can put people in and how they just trust you less. So I think it's, I didn't think we'd end up here, but I do think.

• 55:30Adam Grant?

  It's really important.

• 55:30Brené Brown?

  I do think the, the last, the last couple of lines of your op ed is everything we're talking about. The heart of integrity is recognizing that the ends don't justify the means. What we achieve may define our success, but how we achieve it determines our character. Like, I think that's so important.

• 55:50Adam Grant?

  I do too. I think the means are a measure of our character. And we live in a world, unfortunately, that only measures the ends, not the means. The means are hard to measure. They're often unobservable. And that's why people take shortcuts or cut corners or cheat.

• 56:09Adam Grant?

  And I think that, you know, it's so interesting, you're, I know you're trying to wrap this up here, but I have to, I have to comment on two things that I think are so interesting. One is in braving, when you talk about the, the V, so the other side of vault, I think what you're doing there is you're helping people realize that's actually an integrity violation. And they're not aware of it. So it may be somebody with a strong moral identity who has not connected the practice of disclosing somebody else's secret or confidential information with somebody that they trust as a violation.

• 56:47Brené Brown?

  Yes. Yes. I think that's right. And I think that's where people are like, oh shit. Yeah, it's huge. And it's interesting. You would love our definition of integrity for, that we use for our work, which, because this would, this will really make you crazy with your cheating issue.

• 57:02Adam Grant?

  Uh oh.

• 57:03Brené Brown?

  Yeah, integrity is actively practicing your values, not just professing them, and doing what's right, not what's fun, fast or easy.

• 57:14Adam Grant?

  Yes. Nailed it. Nailed it.

• 57:17Brené Brown?

  Yeah.

• 57:18Adam Grant?

  This is one of my favorite versions of Brené Brown, is the, you go out into the world and study something that everybody thinks they already understand. And you come up with a more nuanced, more complex, more comprehensive understanding of it. You synthesize it in a way that makes it digestible, so that people can actually like pulse check in their relationships, in their interactions. So they can look in the mirror and see how they're doing on these dimensions. And you help us see something both more clearly and also more complexly than we would have otherwise. I love that. I love that so much. And.

• 57:54Brené Brown?

  Wow, thank you.

• 57:55Adam Grant?

  It's, it's, it's really powerful. It, you know, it also, I think it underscores the other thing that I, I'm really thinking about as a result of this conversation, which is, I think a lot of people make the mistake of conflating moral identity with moral image. I want to be perceived as a good person. I don't want to be seen as a bad person. At the end of the day, that just makes you vulnerable to what everyone else is doing. Right? That opens up the possibility that if everybody else is cheating, or a lot of people are cheating, then you know what? They're not going to judge me negatively. So this is okay here, or this is okay now.

• 58:35Brené Brown?

  Wow.

• 58:35Adam Grant?

  I think moral identity has got to be about your self-concept. It has to be about, I don't want to see myself as a person who would do that. I want to see myself as a person who does the right thing. And I think that's, that's what we've got to be doing in homes and schools and workplaces, is laying out really clearly what it means to see yourself as a good person, as a person of, in this case, honor and integrity. And then what are the behaviors that if you engaged in would violate that? What are the behaviors that if you do them consistently would uphold that? And I think that's how we nurture moral identity is we engage kids, starting when they're young, in the process of reflecting on what kind

• 59:16Adam Grant?

  of person do I want to see myself as? And what do I need to do in order to earn that, that identity? And what do I need to make sure also I don't do in order to avoid developing that sense of me?

• 59:28Brené Brown?

  I think this is the heart of everything we've been talking about. Moral image, which is so vulnerable and susceptible to, it's movable. It's movable.

• 59:45Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 59:46Brené Brown?

  Moral identity, not movable. And what's really interesting to me is, I think honesty is a discipline and a practice. And I think you're faced with those things 50 times a day. Like, I remember when, I remember getting to the car, you know, Charlie's a baby. I, I think I wrote about this in a book as an example. Charlie's a baby. Ellen's, you know, we're picking up a poster board is why I think we're at HEB, our grocery store. And I'd run in, Charlie's crying, and I get back and I had paid cash and they gave me a 20 instead

• 1:00:30Brené Brown?

  of a 10. And like, in that split second, I was like, Charlie's too young to learn the lesson anyway. But then I'm like, Ellen, you know, I'm like, oh, Ellen's, you know, it's like, I, we, you know, I've got them in their car seats of like, we got to go back in. And they're like, HEB has a lot of money, but this is not mine.

• 1:00:53Brené Brown?

  You know, and it's, it's, it's a thousand times a day where we have to make those decisions.

• 1:01:00Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Brené Brown?

  And I don't know that I always make them. I don't know that I, I will debate you. If it's a violent movie that I can't watch, I will watch enough of it to debate you about the meaning of that movie, having seen, you know, five eights of it. And then when the person goes, did you watch the movie? I'm like, did you watch the movie? You know, and yeah, I, I, I think I'm imperfect around this. I think-

• 1:01:27Adam Grant?

  That's your white lie.

• 1:01:29Brené Brown?

  Yeah. What do you think of my new haircut? Awesome. Yeah, I'm not, I could always get better, but I do think it's a discipline that I care about. And I don't think it's ever going to be externally motivated.

• 1:01:44Adam Grant?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:45Brené Brown?

  Yeah. Which is why I think it's more guilt than shame.

• 1:01:50Adam Grant?

  I think that resonates. Yeah, I was, I was thinking about what my version of this is, and it's, it's very similar. Although I would just say, I think I watched enough of the movie to, to have the debate with you. But to be honest, I didn't want those images in my head, so I turned it off. I, but I think, I think my version of this is similar, which is I don't want to hurt somebody's feelings. And so I will sometimes withhold what could be a constructive criticism because I don't think they can handle it. And I'll just say, yeah, I thought that was great. When I really thought it was okay or pretty good, and I've got some notes.

• 1:02:25Brené Brown?

  Yeah. I mean, I think now we're into like,

• 1:02:30Brené Brown?

  a different area that I think it's been a great conversation, I think, because we started with intentionally breaking rules to get a better grade, regardless of the rules, just cheating. And it gets, I don't know. I think my, my takeaway is Yoda. Do or don't, you know? I mean, you just have to make a decision.

• 1:02:55Brené Brown?

  And I think what's also interesting is if you're interested in the rumble, the internal rumble, I think it's worth figuring out the messaging that speaks to you the most. And it doesn't have to be the same for all of us. It's about who I want to be, not who, about who I'm afraid that I could be. My reminders that work for me is, you know, I don't say to myself, hey, you know, let's skip working, you know, I gotta go work out today because I don't want to be whatever the word is. What works for me is I'm going to go work out today because I think of myself as an athlete. That's my identity, you know?

• 1:03:30Adam Grant?

  And you have to earn that identity every day.

• 1:03:32Brené Brown?

  On the senior tour, but nonetheless.

• 1:03:38Brené Brown?

  It's good conversation. I appreciate it.

• 1:03:41Adam Grant?

  Right back at you.

• 1:03:43Brené Brown?

  The Curiosity Shop is produced by Brené Brown Education and Research Group and Granted Productions. You can subscribe to The Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com.

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