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09-10-2013, 10:39 AM
I am sharing it to buddies here, a good read IMO...
Here’s why cheating feels good
NEW YORK — When was the last time you cheated? Not on the soul-scorching magnitude of, say, Bernie Madoff, Lance Armstrong or John Edwards. Just nudge-the-golf-ball cheating.
Maybe you rounded up numbers on an expense report. Let your eyes wander during a high-stakes exam. Or copied a friend’s expensive software. And how did you feel afterwards? You may recall nervousness, a twinge of guilt.
But new research shows that as long as you did not think your cheating hurt anyone, you may have felt great. The discomfort you remember feeling then may actually be a response rewritten now by your inner moral authority, your “should” voice.
Unethical behaviour is increasingly studied by psychologists and management specialists. They want to understand what prompts people to abrogate core values, why cheating appears to be on the rise and what interventions can be made. To find a powerful tool to turn people towards ethical decisions, many researchers have focused on the guilt that many adults feel after cheating.
So some behavioural ethics researchers were startled by a study, titled The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behaviour, published recently in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by researchers at the University of Washington, the London Business School, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
One reason for pervasive garden-variety cheating is “that we have so many ways to cheat anonymously, especially via the Web”, said Professor Scott Wiltermuth of the University of Southern California, who writes about behavioural ethics and was not involved in this study. The exhilaration, he added, may come from “people congratulating themselves on their cleverness”.
The impact is real: According to some estimates, software piracy costs companies US$63 billion (S$78.7 billion) a year globally. The Internal Revenue Service has reported an annual gap between actual and reported taxes of about US$345 billion, more than half of that because incomes are under reported and deductions inflated.
In the study’s initial experiments, participants were asked to predict how they would feel if they cheated. Badly, they generally reported. Another set of participants was given a baseline assessment of their moods. Then they took a word-unscrambling test. After finishing, they were handed an answer key, told to check their answers and asked to report the number of correct ones. For every right answer, they would earn US$1.
Participants did not know that researchers could tell if they corrected wrong answers; 41 per cent did so.
The follow-up assessment of their moods indeed showed that the cheaters, on average, felt an emotional boost that the honest participants did not.
Then Dr Nicole Ruedy, the study’s lead author, and her colleagues removed the financial incentive. A new group would take a test on a computer. The results, they were told, would correlate with intelligence and a likelihood of future success. But 77 participants were told that if they saw a pop-up message offering them the correct answer, they should ignore it and continue working. About 68 per cent of this group cheated at least once, clicking the button for the correct answer. In the follow-up assessment, this group also reported a rise in upbeat feelings.
Why did people feel so good about cheating? Was it relief at not being caught? That would imply that while cheating, they felt stress or distress. Or had they deceived themselves, rationalising or minimising the cheating to feel better?
Stripping away these possibilities, the researchers found that those who cheated experienced thrill, self-satisfaction, a sense of superiority. The effect persisted even when subjects cheated indirectly. Next, they would solve math problems with someone who was just pretending to be a participant. The fake participant reported the results, elevating the scores, thus cheating for both. But no actual participant objected. And again, they felt just fine about it.
The researchers did not measure whether the “high” was short-lived. Nonetheless, the elated, addictive feelings triggered by cheating point to the difficulty in changing behaviour, since guilt tripping seems ineffective.
One way may be to remove the potential cheater’s cloak of anonymity. A study last year in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at documents on which cheating often occurs, like tax forms and car insurance policies.
Typically, individuals fill out information first, creatively or honestly, only attesting to accuracy with a signature at the end. But researchers sent an audit form to customers of an auto insurer, asking for their signatures at the top, like a swearing-in before court testimony. This form resulted in a 10.25 per cent bump in the mileage reported, even though higher mileage usually translates into higher premiums.
Dr Ruedy noted that the study’s cheaters believed that no one was hurt by their actions. “Perhaps people could be made aware of the costs that others actually bear,” she said. “Identify victims of their behaviour.” THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.todayonline.com/daily-focus/h...feels-good
Here’s why cheating feels good
NEW YORK — When was the last time you cheated? Not on the soul-scorching magnitude of, say, Bernie Madoff, Lance Armstrong or John Edwards. Just nudge-the-golf-ball cheating.
Maybe you rounded up numbers on an expense report. Let your eyes wander during a high-stakes exam. Or copied a friend’s expensive software. And how did you feel afterwards? You may recall nervousness, a twinge of guilt.
But new research shows that as long as you did not think your cheating hurt anyone, you may have felt great. The discomfort you remember feeling then may actually be a response rewritten now by your inner moral authority, your “should” voice.
Unethical behaviour is increasingly studied by psychologists and management specialists. They want to understand what prompts people to abrogate core values, why cheating appears to be on the rise and what interventions can be made. To find a powerful tool to turn people towards ethical decisions, many researchers have focused on the guilt that many adults feel after cheating.
So some behavioural ethics researchers were startled by a study, titled The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behaviour, published recently in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by researchers at the University of Washington, the London Business School, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
One reason for pervasive garden-variety cheating is “that we have so many ways to cheat anonymously, especially via the Web”, said Professor Scott Wiltermuth of the University of Southern California, who writes about behavioural ethics and was not involved in this study. The exhilaration, he added, may come from “people congratulating themselves on their cleverness”.
The impact is real: According to some estimates, software piracy costs companies US$63 billion (S$78.7 billion) a year globally. The Internal Revenue Service has reported an annual gap between actual and reported taxes of about US$345 billion, more than half of that because incomes are under reported and deductions inflated.
In the study’s initial experiments, participants were asked to predict how they would feel if they cheated. Badly, they generally reported. Another set of participants was given a baseline assessment of their moods. Then they took a word-unscrambling test. After finishing, they were handed an answer key, told to check their answers and asked to report the number of correct ones. For every right answer, they would earn US$1.
Participants did not know that researchers could tell if they corrected wrong answers; 41 per cent did so.
The follow-up assessment of their moods indeed showed that the cheaters, on average, felt an emotional boost that the honest participants did not.
Then Dr Nicole Ruedy, the study’s lead author, and her colleagues removed the financial incentive. A new group would take a test on a computer. The results, they were told, would correlate with intelligence and a likelihood of future success. But 77 participants were told that if they saw a pop-up message offering them the correct answer, they should ignore it and continue working. About 68 per cent of this group cheated at least once, clicking the button for the correct answer. In the follow-up assessment, this group also reported a rise in upbeat feelings.
Why did people feel so good about cheating? Was it relief at not being caught? That would imply that while cheating, they felt stress or distress. Or had they deceived themselves, rationalising or minimising the cheating to feel better?
Stripping away these possibilities, the researchers found that those who cheated experienced thrill, self-satisfaction, a sense of superiority. The effect persisted even when subjects cheated indirectly. Next, they would solve math problems with someone who was just pretending to be a participant. The fake participant reported the results, elevating the scores, thus cheating for both. But no actual participant objected. And again, they felt just fine about it.
The researchers did not measure whether the “high” was short-lived. Nonetheless, the elated, addictive feelings triggered by cheating point to the difficulty in changing behaviour, since guilt tripping seems ineffective.
One way may be to remove the potential cheater’s cloak of anonymity. A study last year in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at documents on which cheating often occurs, like tax forms and car insurance policies.
Typically, individuals fill out information first, creatively or honestly, only attesting to accuracy with a signature at the end. But researchers sent an audit form to customers of an auto insurer, asking for their signatures at the top, like a swearing-in before court testimony. This form resulted in a 10.25 per cent bump in the mileage reported, even though higher mileage usually translates into higher premiums.
Dr Ruedy noted that the study’s cheaters believed that no one was hurt by their actions. “Perhaps people could be made aware of the costs that others actually bear,” she said. “Identify victims of their behaviour.” THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.todayonline.com/daily-focus/h...feels-good
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