Do People Everywhere Cheat?

Are people in some countries more generally dishonest than people in other countries? Two international teams of researchers have examined this question, and both teams have come to similar conclusions.

In 2015, David Pascual-Ezama at Universidad Complutense Madrid and his colleagues investigated dishonesty in 16 different countries: Austria, Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Turkey, USA, and the UK. They recruited 90 university students in each country to play a coin-flipping game.

The game consisted of a single flip of a coin with a black and a white side. If the coin landed with the white side up, the student received a chocolate truffle as a prize.

Each student flipped the coin in private and then reported the result to an experimenter. The experimenter didn't know if a particular student reported the result truthfully or not. But—and here’s the clever part—the experimenter could accurately estimate the level of cheating in the group as a whole by simply counting the total number of chocolate truffles handed out as prizes.

If 90 students flip a coin, the laws of probability dictate that about half (45) of the coins will land on white and receive a prize. If almost all of the students report a prize-winning result, then we have evidence of a high level of cheating in that group.

Somewhat surprisingly, Pascual-Ezama and his team found that, across all 16 countries, only 57% of the students reported the white—just 7 percentage points higher than what we would expect if everyone told the truth. Among those students who would have been tempted to lie because their coin landed on black, 86% of them resisted the temptation and told the truth.

Some of the 16 countries cheated a little more and some a little less, but the differences were not statistically significant. Overall, the researchers observed similarly low levels of dishonesty across countries (Pascual-Ezama et al., 2015).

A Similar Study With Similar Findings

In 2016, Heather Mann at Duke University and her colleagues conducted a similar study. Still, they used a different task and recruited many more participants in each of the five countries: China, Colombia, Germany, Portugal, and the USA.

In each country, approximately 220 students at a university and approximately 200 local residents at coffee shops agreed to play a game on an iPad that involved rolling a virtual die 20 times. Before rolling the die, participants were instructed to mentally choose a side of the die, either the top side (face) or the bottom.

After each roll of the die, the iPad displayed the number of dots on the top and bottom sides of the die. The participants knew they would be paid a small amount of money per dot on the side they privately chose in advance. So, if a participant picked the “wrong” side of the die, she could cheat by claiming to have picked the higher earning side.

As in the earlier study, the experimenters could not determine whether a particular participant cheated, but they could closely estimate the overall level of cheating in a country by comparing the number of “higher earning” choices reported with the number expected by chance.

Across all five countries, participants said they had picked (in advance) the higher earning side of the die in 58% of the trials. This result is 8 percentage points higher than expected if everyone tells the truth and no one cheats. In other words, when the result of the rolled die was unfavorable, participants told the truth about 84% of the time—a result remarkably similar to that of the earlier study in 16 countries.

As before, some countries cheated more and some less, but the differences were small and not statistically significant. Overall, the researchers observed similarly low levels of dishonesty across countries.

A Theory of Incomplete Cheating

According to Mann and her colleagues (Mann et al., 2016), the results of these two cross-national studies provide empirical support for the theory of self-concept maintenance, a spin-off of Festinger and Aronson's theory of cognitive dissonance. The theory says we’re motivated by external incentives to cheat, but we’re also motivated by an internal desire to see ourselves as a good, decent, moral person. A low level of dishonesty (so-called “incomplete cheating”) is the result of our attempt to find a happy medium between extrinsic incentives to act dishonestly and our own intrinsic desire to be a moral person.