[CQ-Contest] the growth of cheating

[kr2q at optimum.net]

FYI...
de Doug KR2Q


The New York Times

The dark side I
Why do people cheat?
By Drake Bennett
Published: Thursday, October 4, 2007

These are tough times for fair play.

Any sports fan could reel off a list of recent cheating scandals: the doping revelations in
professional cycling and baseball; match-fixing in Italian professional soccer involving some 
of the most storied teams in Europe; the National Basketball Association referee who 
admitted to betting on games he worked.

Closer to my home, three weeks ago, a police prosecutor in Hanover, New Hampshire, 
announced that he might bring felony charges against nine students accused of breaking 
into their high school to steal advance copies of exams. And the New England Patriots of 
the National Football League, the favorites to win the Super Bowl, were caught videotaping 
signals by their opponent during a game.

All of which has left people scratching their heads. Why would smart students steal a test? 
Why would the best team break a rule, especially when they had already been warned 
about the behavior?

Why, in other words, do people cheat in situations where there is little to gain - one 
good grade, a slight edge in a game - and so much to lose?

Irrationality may be the rule, and not the exception, when it comes to cheating, 
according to scholars who have turned their attention to the mysteries of the cheating mind.

Cheating is often thought of as something that is done after cold calculation. But the 
new research has found that people are prone to cheat even when it is not in their best 
interest. Instead of carefully weighing the costs and benefits of breaking the rules, 
people can be heavily swayed by peer pressure, mood, their image of themselves. 
Sometimes, people even cheat out of a sense of fairness.

The new findings about the psychology of cheating comes at a time when other 
researchers are finding evidence that cheating is a widespread part of sports, and 
not merely in the sort of cases that make the news. Using economics as a forensic 
tool, they're arguing that foul play, either by referees or players, is common in sports 
as varied as figure skating, basketball and sumo wrestling.

Economists who have looked specifically at sports argue that their work is more than 
just an investigation of games, but a window into the workings of the human mind. 
To them, sports and games serve as ready-made experiments - people competing on 
roughly equal terms, under agreed-upon rules, for the same clear, quantifiable goals - 
with the potential to yield insights into how we live the rest of our lives.

"It's a metaphor," says Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor at the University of 
Pennsylvania's Wharton School who has looked at point shaving in college basketball. 
"The data are plentiful, and we can have very sharp predictions and test them. And 
the lessons, hopefully, are generalizable."

If economists like Wolfers are to be believed, cheating is more widespread than we 
hear about. Wolfers looked at the scores of more than 44,000 Division 1 college 
basketball games from 1989 to 2005 and found that the number of times that the 
winning team just failed to beat the "spread," the expected margin of victory as 
determined by Las Vegas bookmakers, couldn't be explained by chance.

More likely, he argues, players on the winning team were holding back just a little 
bit. They would still win, but so would gamblers who had bet against the spread - 
and who, Wolfers surmised, had colluded with the players beforehand. Wolfers found 
that 5 percent of the games with large spreads showed this sort of suspicious score.

Perhaps the best-known study of this kind was by Steven Levitt, an economics 
professor at the University of Chicago and co-author of the best-selling book 
"Freakonomics," who looked at match fixing in sumo wrestling. Other economists 
who have delved into the subject include Eric Zitzewitz, an associate professor of
economics at Dartmouth, who has found evidence of vote trading among figure-skating 
judges in the Olympics. Luis Garicano and Canice Prendergast of the University of Chicago, 
along with Ignacio Palacios-Huerta of Brown University, have looked at systematic 
favoritism among Spanish soccer referees.

Paradoxically, one of the most powerful motivations for cheating, according to scholars 
who study decision-making, is a desire for fairness.

In recent weeks, the most widely heard justification on New England sports blogs and 
radio shows for the Patriots' cheating was that other teams in the league were almost 
certainly doing the same thing. Professional cyclists describe similar pressures to take 
performance-enhancing drugs - a complaint only strengthened by the recent confirmation 
of Tour de France champion Floyd Landis's positive drug test.

In a way, this is common sense: If an opponent is illegally gaining some advantage over me, 
I'll want to balance things out. But what's more surprising is the way the effect extends 
beyond situations in which cheating confers an advantage.

Robert Kurzban, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that players in 
a game he created are less likely to behave selfishly when they know that other players 
aren't behaving selfishly, even though being the only player to behave selfishly actually 
increases one's winnings at the game. That would suggest that most people, if they could 
be assured no one else was cheating, would not to cheat.

Daylian Cain, an assistant professor specializing in decision-making at the Yale School of 
Management, believes that the "defensive" model explains much of the cheating one sees 
in sports. Since coaches and players can't know what opponents are doing, they "tend to 
think that others are doing what they are doing and thinking what they are thinking," he says.

Findings like these emerge from a broader wave of research looking at the ways in which we 
calculate - and miscalculate - costs and benefits in making decisions, whether it's a coach 
choosing to go for it on fourth down or a head of state choosing to go to war.

And while the idea of defensive cheating emerges from a new model of how people react to 
incentives, other research is looking at the complicated, sometimes conflicting ways in which 
we think about costs.

In particular, people seem willing in some cases to simply ignore the cost of getting caught. 
In a set of experiments carried out in 2005 by the economists Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely, of 
MIT, and On Amir, a marketing expert at the University of California at San Diego, subjects 
were given a timed test of general-knowledge questions and paid for each correct answer.

They varied the setup of the experiment and found that people would tend to cheat when 
given the chance, but that the risk of being discovered did not deter them. Even more surprisingly, 
the experimenters found a way to limit cheating that had nothing to do with the threat of getting 
caught.

When they asked subjects to write down as many of the Ten Commandments as they could 
remember before taking the test, it virtually eliminated cheating.

Drake Bennett is a staff writer for the Ideas section of the Boston Globe, where this article 
first appeared.