For those not used to winning, it can be tempting to assume that those who do win do so by employing nefarious means. Indeed, a notable study from a few years ago found that winners in a skill-based competition were indeed more likely to cheat their competitors in subsequent games of chance.
New research from the University of Leicester casts these findings into doubt and suggests that success doesn’t always prompt winners to subsequently cheat. The researchers believe that the original study was based on an excessively small sample, with the results not replicated when they repeated the study with a much larger sample.
Instead, the researchers found that people with a strong sense of fairness were less likely to cheat, with this holding true regardless of whether they’d won or lost in the past.
“We were surprised by the findings in the 2016 study, and that’s why we wanted to replicate it with substantial sample sizes,” the researchers explain. “The original study’s small samples do not have the statistical power to generate firm conclusions.”
Honest behavior
The researchers examined the behavior of over 250 volunteers who participated in a lab-based game that was identical to that in the original study. A further 275 volunteers then completed an additional game online.
While there was a small, yet significant level of cheating occurring that was comparable with that found in the original study, this did not increase when someone won (or lost). Instead, the only thing that seemed to affect whether someone cheated or not was low “inequality aversion”.
This is when people have a general dislike of seemingly unequal outcomes and is often associated with a strong sense of fairness. As a result, they generally don’t cheat because it’s viewed as an unfair practice.
“Cheating and general dishonesty are of growing concern in the light of academic dishonesty in the digital age, problems of tax avoidance and evasion by wealthy people in developed economies, and more generally effects of widening inequality in wealth and income on corruption and crime,” the researchers conclude.
