Why Iranian handlers pay their spies so little — and what it teaches us about how we all negotiate with our own conscience

A friend recently shared with me a quote from the Times of Israel’s daily podcast, on an episode about Israelis who spy for Iran. It’s the kind of quote that anyone should read twice:

“…if the Iranian handlers offered lots of money, then the soldiers or the civilians or whoever it is involved would feel like they are actually carrying out treason if it’s in exchange for lots of money. But when it’s a small amount of money? They feel less bad about it.”

Stop and notice how strange this sounds. Standard economics says that if you want someone to do something costly and risky — and betraying your country is about as costly and risky as it gets — you should pay them more. Bigger incentive, more takers. And yet here are the handlers, professionals in the business of getting people to cross lines, deliberately paying less. Not because they’re cheap. Because small payments work better.They have, in effect, rediscovered something we found in the lab almost twenty years ago.

In our research on dishonesty, Nina Mazar, On Amir and I gave people a simple math task and paid them per correct answer, with an easy opportunity to cheat. The standard economic prediction is that people would cheat as much as they could get away with. That’s not what happened. People cheated — but just a little. A few questions here and there, well below what they could have safely claimed. We called the force behind this the “fudge factor”: the idea is that we want the benefits of cheating, but we also want to keep seeing ourselves as good, honest people, and we resolve this tension by cheating exactly up to the point where our self-image starts to complain. Small transgressions slip through our moral accounting unrecorded. Big ones get flagged.

And here is the detail that connects directly to the Iranian spies: in our experiments, raising the payoff for cheating did not increase cheating. If anything, when the amounts got large, people cheated less. Taking ten dollars you didn’t earn makes you “someone who rounded up.” Taking a hundred makes you a thief — and that label is precisely what the fudge factor cannot digest.

The Iranian handlers understand this accounting perfectly. I don’t think they have read our research or my book, but I think they have learned the same lesson from their own experience over time. The payment isn’t really compensation; it’s a categorization device. Nobody can accept a million dollars to photograph a secret military installation and still tell themselves a story in which they’re not a spy. The money itself would scream the truth. But a few hundred dollars to take a picture of a street corner? That’s not treason, that’s a gig. “It’s just to cover expenses.” The small price tag keeps the act filed in the mental drawer of small favors, right next to inflating an expense report — and that is the drawer our conscience never audits.

But this is just the first act of the journey down the slippery slope of doing things we wouldn’t have imagined we would do. There’s a second act to this playbook. Once someone has taken the small payment and done the small task, they’re no longer a person who would never work for Iran — that line is already behind them. The next request can be slightly bigger, and refusing it now means admitting that the previous one was wrong too. One small, cheaply-priced step at a time, people walk into places they would never have agreed to jump to.

I don’t expect many of my readers to be approached by foreign handlers. But all of us run the same accounting system, and all of us are surrounded by people who price things to keep them feeling small — and by our own inner handler doing exactly the same (“it’s just one invoice,” “everyone rounds up a little”). The espionage cases are just the extreme edge of a very ordinary machinery: the really dangerous transgressions rarely arrive looking big. They arrive priced small, precisely so our conscience will wave them through.

So here is the lesson, and it’s one worth teaching our kids and our organizations: when you’re deciding whether something is right, judge the act, not the price tag. And if someone ever offers you suspiciously little money for something that feels a bit off — understand that the smallness of the offer is not reassuring. It is the most alarming thing about it.

Source: The Times of Israel Daily Briefing, “As both sides keep striking, is there still a Lebanon ceasefire?”, April 26, 2026.

Mazar, N., Amir, O., & Ariely, D. (2008). The dishonesty of honest people: A theory of self-concept maintenance. Journal of Marketing Research, 45(6), 633–644.

Ariely, D. (2012). The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves. New York: Harper.