Why some cheat more than others

02 November 2005

People who cheat are more likely to have a "self-serving" personality that skews the way they interpret information, research reveals.

"People with a self-serving personality are more likely to engage in rationalised cheating," says University of New South Wales research author, Dr Bill von Hippel.

"Rationalised cheating refers to the type of cheating people engage in when they can construe their behaviour as being unintended - such as 'forgetting' to declare certain types of income on a tax return.

"It seems that some of us are good at rationalising our foibles and can convince ourselves that our behaviour is driven by the best of intentions, even at our most selfish moments," says Dr von Hippel, whose study was published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

The study participants were 303 university students who completed a battery of tests. Cheating was measured via two computer-administered maths tests. Participants were told to hit the computer's spacebar as soon as a maths problem appeared to activate an on-screen response-box, after which they were to solve the problem. If they answered the question incorrectly, the question remained on-screen until they answered correctly.

They were also told that if they took too long to hit the spacebar the answer to the maths problem would appear on screen, due to a 'bug' in the software program. This gave them an opportunity to cheat, by simply waiting for the answer to appear rather than hitting the spacebar in a timely fashion.

In the first set of questions participants had 10 seconds to hit the spacebar before the answer appeared. For a second set of questions participants knew they had only one second to hit the spacebar before the answer appeared. Participants performed the tests in private cubicles and were told that the researchers wouldn't know if they had seen the answers, although in fact this information was monitored.

The researchers observed substantial cheating during both sets of questions with cheating rates averaging 40 to 50 percent.

Most importantly, approximately 10 percent of people tended to cheat on the second maths set but not the first one. These people appeared to feel that it was wrong to cheat on purpose, but when they only had a brief time to respond they could rationalise their cheating as unintended, reflecting a simple failure to be quick enough (although other tasks in the experiment demonstrated that they were perfectly capable of hitting the spacebar within one second).

Furthermore, these were the same people who were most likely to have self-serving traits in other domains - for example, they tended to aggrandise their successes and minimize their failures. This pattern of results suggests that self-serving people are particularly likely to cheat when they can explain it away as unintended.

Funding statement

The research was partly supported by funding from The Australian Research Council.

About Bill von Hippel

Bill von Hippel, PhD, is associate professor in the school of psychology at the University of New South Wales. His research interests include prejudice and stereotyping, social-cognitive ageing, and evolutionary psychology.

A full copy of Professor von Hippel's research paper is available upon request.

Homepage: http://www.psy.unsw.edu.au/Users/BHippel

Media contacts: Dr Bill von Hippel: 02 9385 1643 (voice & fax), or 0422 931 198. Dan Gaffney: UNSW science media liaison 0411 156 015