Cheating

"Cheating is typical", said Dan Ariely in an interview with New Scientist.  He reckons that "we are all prone to dishonesty" when the circumstances are right.  How prone we are depends on our morality, and our culture, to some extent, but if the circumstances favour cheating and if we think we are doing the right thing by cheating, then we will cheat.

In an experiment, he found that when people are told that they can shred their answers and then tell how many they were able to attempt in five minutes, most people would claim that they have done six when they actually only did four.  Not many would exaggerate to say ten or twenty, as people to have some sense of self esteem.

Ariely reckons that many cheat in the world of banking, where the stakes are high and the rules are not clear.  They rationalise that this is what they are paid to do; it is not really cheating when their colleagues and counterparts and competitors are doing it; it is not cheating when they are doing what is expected of them.  Ariely seems to advocate the view that we have the tendency to do what we think to be rationally appropriate, even when it may not be morally correct.

What do you think?  Do you cheat?  Does everyone cheat?  Is cheating rational?

Something else in my recent reading was about the "Piltdown man", who turned out to be a hoax.

It had long been anticipated that there would be a "missing link", a hybrid species between ape and man, if man had truly evolved from apes.  A discovery in the early 20th century suggested that perhaps archaeologists had found this link.  The Piltdown man was derived from a finding of skull and jawbone fragments - the skull was that of a man, the jaw was that of an ape, and there was a tooth of an elephant in the puzzle as well.

It was later discovered that the age of these bones were not consistent with each other.  The finding was a fraud.

Who conscripted this fraud?  Why?  Was it to deceive the world?  Was any money involved?  Scientific credibility or prestige?  The world did not gain from being duped, although the devil may have led some astray because of this lie.

Is the Piltdown man part of the cheating psychology that Ariely talks about?  Why do we deceive others, and ourselves?  What do you think?