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03/14/2009: "Is cheating contagious?"
Here, briefly, is what they did: They asked a large group of university students to solve a set of complex math problems in a very short time. They made it hard enough that none could realistically solve all the problems, and they paid them for whatever ones they did solve. The math exercise was just a pretense for the real experiment: shortly after the students began on the math problems, one of them (actually a paid actor) loudly announced to the room: "I've solved everything. What should I do?" Everyone in the room knew this was impossible, so the student-actor was a clear example of blatant cheating. He also took all of the cash, as if he had a perfect score and - very important - left without any consequences.
The idea was to see how many of the students followed the cheater's example - to see if blatant dishonesty boosted cheating among students generally. And it did, dramatically. But the psychologists added another twist to the experiment: sometimes they had the actor wear the T shirt of a rival university, other times not. They wanted to see if the cheater's group identity - classmate or outsider - influenced the level of copycat cheating. That is, would students cheat more (or less) when they saw a rival cheat, as compared to seeing a compatriot cheat?
The results were unambiguous. As reported in the March issue of Psychological Science, fellow classmates had much more influence than outsiders. Indeed, seeing a rival cheat actually lowered the level of overall cheating slightlyâ€"compared to students who simply cheated on their own initiative, without any prodding. These findings argue against the "cold calculation" theory of cheating. After all, if the students only weighed the can-I-get-away-with-it factor, then they would have been influenced equally by the successful cheating of both compatriot and outsider. And they weren't.
[ If this is the case then more Jews will cheat having seen Madoff's example, while gentiles will be less likely to. There is also a great deal of evidence suggesting that the presence of diverse groups increases cheating as one group will look for ways to exploit people particularly from another group if they can get away with it - leading to a higher level of cheating even within groups. It is something that can be explained in terms of shared genetics too. ]
http://www.newsweek.com/id/188953?from=rss