What Is Dishonesty? Genders Give The Honest Answer!

Do you know how the two genders perceive the concept of 'honesty"? Public attitudes to deceitful behaviour have shown that men and women"s views of what is dishonest vary greatly.

Women are more likely to categorise some behaviour as dishonest, than men. Men are more likely to convict someone of a dishonest crime in a court of law than women.

Many men believe that it is not dishonesty to take stationery home from work. They also found big discrepancies between online crime and physical crime. Dishonesty vary from taking a DVD from a shop, downloading pirated music, buy a pirate DVD, wearing a dress before returning it to the shop, conduct an online romance behind his wife"s back etc.

Women are more likely to categorise a person"s conduct as dishonest but less likely to convict that person of the offence. They feel that it is dishonesty for a carer to try to persuade an elderly person to change their will in their favour. Females are more likely to excuse conduct by reference to the circumstances or character of the person involved

Two academic criminologists released the study at the British Science Festival at Surrey University, Guildford. The online study analyzed the attitude of some 15,000 participants to 50 different scenarios in 10 categories that involved varying degrees of dishonest behaviour, from claiming for an expensive insurance fraud to eating grapes in a supermarket without paying for them. It was carried out with a view to testing a central thesis of what constitutes dishonesty in law, namely that dishonesty as a state of mind is based legally upon the "ordinary standards of reasonable and honest people."