Job applicants will fabricate expertise in entirely nonexistent equipment to win positions

Evidence

The human capacity for cognitive reconstrual of transgressive conduct as minor or even worthy knows no bounds. Research on résumé fraudsters sheds some light on the type of cognitive construal processes by which anyone can turn a moral issue into a lesser infraction. To demonstrate the pervasiveness of résumé fraud, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey ran a phony ad for electricians with expertise in the Sontag connector (McGarvey, 1993). The Port Authority received résumés from 170 applicants who claimed familiarity with this apparatus. Over half of them claimed they were licensed Sontag experts with over 10 years of experience. Some even listed projects in which they used the Sontag connector. However, this seemingly masterly set of applicants outwitted themselves: There is no Sontag connector. This is a surprisingly high level of fraud with applicants claiming proficiency on a contrivance that does not exist! — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1433

Categorization

• CANDY: The nonexistent Sontag connector sting is a genuinely fun, tweetable anecdote: 170 applicants claimed expertise in a fake device.
• ADDENDUM: This bears on the grafted/false-pretenses theme in the grafted-trees infrastructure piece only loosely, but is a nice instance of how invented credentials get performed for an authority that never verifies.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1433