How winning leads to cheating

We live, for better or for worse, in a competition-driven world. Rivalry powers our economy, sparks technological innovation and encourages academic discovery. But it also compels people to manipulate the system and commit crimes. Some figure it’s just easier and even acceptable, to cheat.

But what if instead of examining how people behave in a competitive setting, we wanted to understand the consequences of competition on their everyday behaviour That is exactly what Amos Schurr, a business and management professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and Ilana Ritov, a psychologist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discuss in a study in last week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“How can it be,” Schurr asks, “that successful, distinguished people — take [former New York State Gov.] Eliot Spitzer, who I think was a true civil servant when he started out his career — turn corrupt At the same time, you have other successful people, like Mother Teresa, who don’t become corrupt. What distinguishes between these two types of successful people ” Schurr and Ritov found that when people win a competition in which success is measured by social comparison rather than by a fixed standard, they are more likely to engage in unrelated unethical behaviour — in the case of this study, to cheat their peers out of money. “We are the first to ask what happens to contestants and their behaviour after a competition ends,” Schurr says, “we found competitions have long-lasting effects.”

Long lasting effects of winning Researchers performed a series of experiments to test these effects. For the initial competition, they had groups of students take part in an estimation task. Students were told that those who performed best at estimating the number of signs that flashed across a computer screen would be considered “winners”. In reality, however, winners were randomly assigned in order to avoid selection bias.

The students were then assigned another task. They were randomly split into pairs: One was given two dice and a cup with a hole in the bottom, the other was told to simply watch. The pair then played a game over 12 shekels, in which the first student put the cup over the dice and shook it so that only he could see the results of the roll. His outcome, between two and 12, would dictate how many shekels he could take; his partner would receive the remaining amount.

No one except Schurr and Ritov knew who had won or lost the initial competition. Compared with a control group, in which the claimed payout was approximately seven, or the expected value (halfway between two and 12), students who had previously won the competition overclaimed the outcomes of their rolls and took in an average of 8.75 shekels. Schurr and Ritov repeated the dice-under-a-cup game after students participated in a number of other tasks in which “winning” was defined by different parameters. The researchers found that competitive settings determine behaviour. “You have two types of success,” Schurr says.

“One involves social comparison [as in the case of being a better estimator] and the other does not. And when you measure success in terms of ‘how good am I’ in reference to other people, that’s when people may turn corrupt.”