Tonight, CNBC will air "(Dis)Honesty – The Truth About Lies," a documentary that is part of The (Dis)Honesty Project. The (Dis)Honesty Project is the work of Dan Ariely, a behavioral scientist and a professor at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

As explained on the CNBC website, 

There are liars and cheaters all around us. From little white lies to extraordinary acts of criminal deceit, this fascinating new CNBC documentary examines this darker side of the human character, and our culture, through first-person accounts from five people who explain with startling candor how their lies lead to disastrous results: a Wall Street trader and a lawyer who run an insider trading scheme that lands them in prison; a disgraced NBA referee, convicted of betting illegally on games; an unhappily married woman in Florida who goes online to cheat on her husband; and a senior manager caught cooking the books at a major corporation. All of them rationalized their behavior and somehow came to believe their acts were justified.

The documentary attempts to show "why so many of us lie in big ways or small, how we can still feel we're essentially honest despite our duplicity, and what we can do to stem an epidemic of cheating that costs us billions in fraud and even more in the erosion of public trust."

 

The Wall Street trader and lawyer profiled in the documentary for their audacious insider trading scheme are Garrett Bauer and Matthew Kluger, who along with a middleman named Kenneth Robinson carried out a 17-year scheme that netted tens of millions of dollars in illegal profits. The men were arrested in 2011, and all three pleaded guilty. Kluger is now serving the longest prison sentence ever handed down for insider trading (12 years).

 

The video clip above is a preview of the segment about Bauer and Kluger. In this preview, Kluger explains how he ended up crossing an ethical line he had never intended to cross, and how Bauer convinced him that "what they were doing, though wrong, was (a) common and (b) not really hurting anybody."

 

The full documentary airs tonight at 10 pm ET on CNBC.

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