Last year, professional hobbyists around the country were caught in alleged cheating scandals. 

In September 2022, world chess champion Magnus Carlsen accused grandmaster Hans Niemann of cheating. In October, a grand jury indicted fishermen Jacob Runyan and Chase Cominsky for packing weights into fish in an attempt to win nearly $30,000 at an Ohio tournament; the world’s oldest and largest competitive Irish Step dancing organization launched a major investigation after it received allegations that top teachers were purported to have rigged competitions for their students; and organizers of Fat Bear Week in Alaska uncovered voting irregularities that were meant to skew the results of a pivotal semifinal. 

Earlier in 2022, NASCAR disqualified the top two finishers of one race for cheating, the #1 ranked cornhole duo was found to have illegal bean bags at the American Cornhole League National Championship in Rock Hill, South Carolina; a pro poker player was a accused of using ‘hidden vibrating device’ to help her win $130,000 hand; and the Miss USA contestants walked off the stage claiming that Miss Texas’ win was predetermined by event organizers. Indeed, there appeared to be a plague of cheating scandals. 

But WHY? Why do people cheat? What’s the motivation? Is it a desire to be in control? To avoid embarrassment or awkwardness? To attain a certain rank or status? To see if they can get away with it? And why are people cheating now? Are there economic or geopolitical factors that might nudge someone toward cheating? Most people know the difference between right and wrong, so what happens internally when someone decides to cheat? Does a cheated win have the same psychological reward as an earned one?

In response to these cheating scandals, arts&sciences asked three faculty members from three academic fields: Why do people cheat? 

Victor Kumar, Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Why cheat? Perhaps the better question is: Why not cheat? Cheating can be a shortcut to money, fame, and success. It promises all the reward without the work. It’s the path of least resistance—as long as you can avoid being caught. 

Surprisingly, though, the real deterrent is that you also have to be able to justify it to yourself. Humans are moral creatures—we don’t always do the right thing, obviously, but we try to live up to our moral values. Or at least most of us do, most of the time.

But what if you want to overcome this moral barrier? One way is by cheating but just a little. For example, it’s unlikely that anyone who cheats at professional chess begins by consulting a program at every turn; they start by doing so only occasionally. As psychologist Dan Ariely argues, people who cheat just a little can grab the advantage while still considering themselves a good person on the whole. 

Another strategy for defeating your conscience? Noticing that other people are cheating, too. Data suggest that most college students have cheated at one time or another. Unfortunately, then, to the extent that this fact becomes common knowledge, students can more easily overcome the moral barrier to cheating—if others are enjoying an unfair advantage, then you’re not a bad person if you cheat, you’re a chump if you don’t! 

So what are professors to do? Well, they can of course make it harder to get away with cheating by using plagiarism-detection tools. They can also make it harder for students to cheat while retaining a positive self-image by emphasizing that academic integrity requires absolutely zero cheating. The problem is that over-policing students pollutes the open intellectual atmosphere that enables learning and growth. A better idea is to eliminate the competitive environment that helps students justify cheating: no grading on a curve; allow students to work together. Not only do measures like these curb cheating, they also mimic business, industry, and other careers where people cooperate with their colleagues, rather than compete with them, to produce knowledge and accomplish goals. If professors take this route, then perhaps they can avoid cheating students out of a worthwhile education. 

Ray Fisman, Slater Family Chair in Behavioral Economics.

I don’t study cheating per se, but rather corruption which, as I’ll argue in a moment, is closely related. Let me start by stating the obvious: There are many explanations for why people cheat (or act corruptly) so I am most certainly not going to give you a grand unified theory of anything. What I’ll offer is some evidence both on what might make people act dishonestly, and also what we might do about it.

Some years ago, I was talking with a friend of mine, Edward Miguel, about a story we’d seen via the BBC on unpaid parking tickets of UN diplomats (amazingly, the link for this original story is still active). Diplomats, unlike the rest of us, can’t be punished for unpaid parking or charged with crimes more generally, by virtue of their diplomatic immunity – something that’s been around forever to, say, ensure that Genghis Khan wouldn’t behead visiting emissaries that had come to negotiate in good faith. Based on a casual internet search, it seemed like the worst diplomatic parking offenders came from countries with reputations for corruption. We thought this was an interesting setting to analyze whether people act in self-serving and opportunistic ways when there is no legal consequence from doing so. The New York City government was kind enough to offer us records of every unpaid ticket over the preceding few years, and we used these data to show, in a 2007 study, that home-country corruption was a remarkably good predictor of whether a diplomat chose to double park in Midtown Manhattan or ignore the meter whilst out on the town. We took this result to indicate that corruption is driven in part by norms or customs rather than simply a difference in effective legal enforcement across countries. 

This raises the question – where do these different norms come from? And how do we change them? You could write a book on the topic (which we’ve done!) but here are a few teasers: leading by example matters. This theme is highlighted by a recently-published study which showed that corruption scandals in Mexico raised the cheating rate of high school students by 10 percent. We can only hope that setting the right example can similarly inspire the next generation to hold themselves to a higher standard. 

Let me return to my earlier observation that there are lots of factors that lead us to cheat and generally do things we know, in our heart of hearts, we really shouldn’t be doing. Norms mattered for the self-serving behavior of UN diplomats. But so did the threat of punishment. When the New York City government finally got permission to impound diplomatic vehicles with unpaid tickets, we show that the number of violations dropped to near zero overnight. Incentives matter. We’d like to hope that people act honorably as a matter of conscience and principle. But if they don’t, we’d better be ready to pull out the stick.  

Peter Blake, Associate Professor, Psychological & Brain Sciences

People usually cheat because they have something to gain and this is evident in childhood. In one of the oldest studies on cheating in children, researchers gave thousands of elementary school kids the chance to cheat on a range of tasks in which they were rewarded based on performance. Almost all of them cheated at least once (Hartshorne & May, 1928, Studies in Deceit). Recent research has confirmed that cheating is normal in childhood, but also that simple changes to a situation, like adding barriers to deter peeking, are quite effective.

But there can also be positive reasons to cheat, such as helping someone else. In one of the most famous scenarios used to study moral decisions, a character named Heinz must decide whether to steal a drug to save his wife’s life. In some societies, people will also cheat to help their group in ways that do not directly benefit themselves. So there are multiple motives for cheating even though we typically think of personal gain.

How people feel about cheating, and whether they do it, also has a lot to do with whether they think other people do it. At BU, everyone crosses the street against the light, so it seems not very bad. But try that in Germany and you will get dirty looks (I know that from personal experience). Now new technologies like ChatGPT make cheating relatively easy and can make it seem common. And if students believe that cheating with AI is common, it can actually become common.

There is always some baseline level of cheating – almost 100 years after that early cheating study, children still cheat. As for some of the smaller cheating scandals you referred to, I think they are just strange enough to catch our attention and almost provide comic relief. Why would someone cheat in the fat bear contest? Unless there was betting involved, this stands out because there was nothing to gain.