Does the law make you more likely to cheat? New research challenges the popular idea of psychology
Does the law make you more likely to cheat? New research challenges the popular idea of psychology
Why do people cheat? An intriguing study by two Israeli researchers in 2016 advanced a possible reason that has since become well-established in scientific literature and popular media.
Researchers reported a series of experiments apparently showing that people who reported winning a skill-based competition, such as a visual task, subsequently cheat more than others in games of chance, such as dice games. . The explanation offered was that winners experienced a sense of entitlement that prompted them to cheat.
The article has been widely cited by other researchers. A scholarly commentary article even highlighted its importance in light of tax avoidance which costs governments US$3.1trillion (£2.6trillion) a year.
But does the discovery stand up to scientific scrutiny? We decided to replicate the study and take a closer look at why people cheat or don’t cheat.
Our new study, published in Royal Society Open Science, twice failed to replicate the original finding. We found the original experiments to be “statistically insufficient”, meaning that they used far too few experimental participants (43 in their main experiment) to support the conclusions that were drawn.
There were also problems with experimental design and methodology, including the inability to randomly decide which participants were winners, losers, or part of a control group who were not told their results in the competition based on on skills.
We started by replicating the original research as closely as possible, but in a large-scale experiment (252 participants) to achieve adequate statistical power. We also randomly assigned participants to conditions.
To assign winners and losers, we used the perceptual judgment test used in the original experiment. The test involves the difficult task of estimating which of several different symbols is the most numerous in briefly displayed slides similar to the one shown below.
We put participants in pairs and told them if they scored better or worse than their partner on the skill task. They were then placed in new pairs and played a game of chance. The pairs then played a game of chance, also identical to the original search game. This involved rolling two dice under an inverted cup, then peeking through a peephole in its base to see the result.
Players were asked to use money from an envelope provided according to the figures displayed by the dice – 25 pence for each dice slot. Although it’s impossible to say who specifically cheated, collecting much more than the average amount was evidence of cheating.
We also assigned one-third of the participants to a control group. They were not told whether or not they beat their partner in the visual task before playing the dice game.
Comparing the results to what we expected to happen by chance, a small but statistically significant amount of cheating appears to have occurred, as in the original Israeli experiment. But our results showed no evidence that winning (or losing) had a statistically significant effect on cheating, as can be seen in the graph below, where the dotted line shows the expected value by chance, without cheating.
We also conducted an even larger online experiment (275 participants) in which we randomly assigned participants to be winners, losers, or control participants using the same perception test as before.
In this experiment, each participant tossed a coin ten times and claimed rewards (Amazon gift certificates) based on the number of heads they tossed. The results were almost identical to our first experiment: we found a similar level of cheating and no evidence of an effect of winning or losing on subsequent cheating.
We used standardized psychometric tests designed to measure differences between people that might influence cheating, including a sense of entitlement, self-confidence, belief in personal luck, and a few other factors. But only one was found to be statistically significant across all treatment conditions.
Participants who do not like inequalities cheat less than others. This is probably because they had a stronger sense of fairness and viewed cheating as unfair. A sense of entitlement, on the other hand, was not significantly associated with cheating in any condition.
Ultimately, what makes some people cheat more than others is not fully understood. But our research suggests that people’s feelings about inequality are part of the explanation. There are also momentary circumstantial factors that induce some people, but not others, to cheat.
Psychology in crisis
The original Israeli experiment is not replicable, and it must be seen in the context of what is called the crisis of replication or reproducibility in psychology. This refers to the fact that many recorded scientific findings are impossible to replicate when experiments are repeated.
One of the main drivers of the crisis is insufficient statistical power, that is, the use of sample sizes that are too small to produce reliable results. Both of our experiments had extremely high statistical power (95%), as required by the publisher of our registered report.
Another driver of the crisis is “publication bias”, that is, when articles with a positive result are more likely to be published than those with a negative result. Factors such as “p-hacking” (performing several different statistical tests on the data until one turns out to be significant) and harking (creating a hypothesis once the results are known) are also to blame.
Recorded reports, in which researchers submit research proposals, including hypotheses and planned statistical tests before the research is undertaken, can ultimately help eliminate most factors of replication crisis. Such an approach will undoubtedly help us one day to discover other reasons why people cheat.
