To cheat or not, that’s the question

By Alex P. Vidal

“I would prefer even to fail with honor than win by cheating.”—Sophocles

LEAKED questionnaire in a university admission examination is also a form of cheating. It appears cheating—or our inclination to commit it if given the opportunity—has become part of our culture and identity.

I once caught an officemate in a local publication changing the amount in the official receipt of a transaction for advertisement that he was about to submit to the accounting office.

I asked him why he did that when we had a regular salary. He only gave me a smirk, a gesture I dismissed as his defense mechanism. I didn’t press further but I lost my respect for the person. I regret I didn’t report the incident to the publisher.

When we place people in some environments, they are able to cheat to a higher degree and when they are placed in a different environment, that same person with the same mindset ends up cheating to a much lower degree.

We cheat in card and mahjong games; we cheat inside the classroom; we cheat in board exams; we cheat by beating the traffic lights; we cheat our parents (by keeping the coins when tasked to do an errand).

Also, we cheat our boyfriends and girlfriends, or our husbands and wives; we cheat out business partners; we cheat our employers; we cheat the insurance; we cheat in the elections; we cheat etcetera.

All humans are actually tempted to cheat, and it comes to the core of what kind of individual is involved in cheating.

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As we get tired by resisting temptation in all kinds of aspects of our lives we end up falling to temptation to a higher degree and cheat and lie to a higher degree.

Forbe’s Dan Schawbel said most people in general don’t think much about what will happen later in lives, we have this general problem of thinking about short-term and not thinking about long-term and this is everywhere.

It’s about why we over-eat and under-exercise, and under-save and text and drive, don’t take our medication on time and have unprotected sex, all of those behaviors are due to the fact that we don’t think about long-term.

In the rational framework of course, people always think about the long-term and in the rational framework of cheating people think in the long-term, but in reality we find that people don’t think so much about the long-term

NPR studied how small-time cheaters still perceive themselves as good people.

“We want to view ourselves as honest, wonderful people and when we cheat … as long as we cheat just a little bit, we can still view ourselves as good people, but once we start cheating too much … we can’t view ourselves as good people and therefore we stop. So this model of trying to balance the ability to view ourselves as good people on one hand and the ability to cheat on the other hand predicts that people will cheat a little bit and they will still feel good about themselves. … That’s what we see across many, many experiments.”

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On how only a few people cheat a lot, but a lot of people cheat a little. “Across all of our experiments, we’ve tested maybe 30,000 people, and we had a dozen or so bad apples, and they stole about $150 from us. And we had about 18,000 little rotten apples, each of them just stole a couple of dollars, but together it was $36,000. And if you think about it, I think it’s actually a good reflection of what happens in society.”

On his favorite cheating experiment. “We give people a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems, and we say, ‘You have 5 minutes to solve as many of those as you can, and we’ll give you $1 per question.’ We say, ‘Go!’ People start, they solve as many as they can, at the end of the five minutes, we say, ‘Stop! Please count how many questions you got correctly, and now that you know how many questions you got correctly, go to the back of the room and shred this piece of paper. And once you’ve finished shredding this piece of paper, come to the front of the room and tell me how many questions you got correctly.’

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10 SUPER SNEAKY WEIGHT-LOSS SECRETS: 1. Never food-shop without gum 2. Ditch your Tupperware 3. Give your guy the first bite 4. Sip from only one type of glass 5. Dish it out 6. Eat after happy hour 7. End your workout with protein 8. Love pretzels 9. Lose the serving dishes 10. Drink after-dinner coffee. SOURCES: Cornwell University Food and Brand Lab; Nutrition and Metabolism Specialist Jana Klauer, M.D.

EIGHT THINGS GUYS NOTICE ABOUT LADIES INSTANTLY: 1. How thick their hair is 2. If their smile is genuine 3. The size of their group 4. The pitch of their voice 5. Their hip-to-waist ratio 6. Their glowiness 7. What’s fake about them 8. Their eyes. SOURCE: Daniel Amen, MD, author of The Brain and Love

SIX WORST THINGS A LADY CAN SAY TO A GUY: 1. You’re so much better than all the other jerks I’ve dated 2. Can you really afford that? 3. So we’re running a little late. Relax 4. He’s a great guy–you should be friends with him 5. She made me promise not to tell, but…6. Don’t be silly–I haven’t done that in ages (Cosmopolitan, November 2009 issue.

WE CAN OVERCOME THE PAIN. Strong people are given many trials and heartaches because it is believed that they can overcome such pain.

That they are brave.

But sometimes we get so tired that we just want to scream and give up.

When that certain time comes that we can no longer walk on our own, God helps us carry our pain.

For as long as God is here, giving up is never a choice.

(The author, who is now based in New York City, used to be the editor of two daily newspapers in Iloilo.—Ed)