Most cheat a little, a few cheat big-time.
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| Nyontek Bro...!!@#@!! |
Studies by Duke University professor Dan Ariely and colleagues
indicate that most people are inclined to cheat, despite the fact that
“we want to view ourselves as honest, wonderful people.” The trick in
maintaining our integrity is by cheating just a little. “ As long as we
cheat just a little bit, we can still view ourselves as good people,”
Ariely says.
Here is how Ariely reaches his conclusion that most
people cheat: he and his colleagues administered a test in which people
had five minutes to solve as many problems as they could. They were
rewarded with $1 for each correct response. At the end of the quiz, the
tester announced the correct answers and respondents gave themselves a
score. They were then told to shred their answer sheets and go to the
tester, tell him the number of correct answers and collect their money.
At this point only the respondents knew whether they were telling the
truth or not regarding their scores.
About 60 percent of the
30,000 people tested cheated on their answers. “We had a dozen or so bad
apples [who stole about $150],” Ariely says, “and about 18,000 little
rotten apples, each of them just stole a couple of dollars.”
Ariely knows that people cheated because he did a little cheating
himself. The shredder really didn’t shred the entire paper, only the
sides, so the researchers had the answers really given by their
subjects.
“What we find is people basically solve four and report
six . . . . We find that lots of people cheat a little bit; very, very
few people cheat a lot.”
Of course, lots of little cheating adds up to big losses. In this case, it costs the researchers $36,000. One
reason for the large-scale small cheating is the diffusion of
responsibility. We see what we do as so small as to be negligible. So it
makes no difference if I don’t turn off lights when I leave the room or
hide a few dollars of income on my tax form. By themselves these are
insignificant things that don’t amount to much to me but cumulative are
very significant.
What we do matters. We just don’t see the
accumulated consequences and conclude that our actions really don’t
count. One of my favorite adages, attributed to Voltaire, sums up this
unfortunate trait nicely. “No snowflake thinks itself responsible for an avalanche,” he wrote.
Note :
Arthur Dobrin, DSW, Professor of University Studies, teaches applied ethics at Hofstra University. He is the author, coauthor, and editor of more than twenty books, including Spelling God with Two O's, Ethics for Everyone: How to Improve Your Moral Intelligence, and Business Ethics: The Right Way to Riches
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