Šmaukšanās
Although it is comforting to think that most people are essentially honest, cheating -- defined as acting dishonestly to gain an advantage -- is actually astoundingly common. In a 1997 survey, management professor Donald McCabe of Rutgers University and Linda Klebe Treviño, a professor of organizational behavior at the Pennsylvania State University, revealed that about three fourths of 1,800 students at nine state universities admitted to cheating on tests or written assignments. In 2005 sociologist Brian Martinson of the HealthPartners Research Foundation in Bloomington, Minn., and his colleagues reported that one third of scientists confessed to engaging in questionable research practices during the previous three years. (..)
Humans are surprisingly quick to cheat when the circumstances are conducive. In 2008 behavioral economist Dan Ariely of Duke University and his colleagues described what happened when they asked college students to solve math puzzles for cash rewards. When the researchers changed the experimental conditions such that the students assumed the examiner could not detect cheating, the average self-reported test score rose significantly. The researchers determined that the scores were not inflated by a few students who cheated a lot but rather by many students cheating a little. (..)
"In 2011 Ariely and behavioral economist Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School reported that people who score higher on psychological tests of creativity are more apt to engage in dishonesty -- a connection that is perhaps not surprising considering that creativity and tactical deception are both products of the neocortex. ... They submit that creative individuals are better at self-deception: they come up with more inventive rationalizations for cheating as a way of making themselves feel better about doing it. As Proust observed in Remembrance of Things Past, 'It is not only by dint of lying to others, but also of lying to ourselves, that we cease to notice that we are lying.' Or as George told Jerry on Seinfeld 75 years later, 'It's not a lie if you believe it.' Ironically, the creativity and intelligence that we regard as distinctly human might have arisen alongside our ability to deceive. We are who we are because we cheat.


From: Ferric C. Fang, Arturo Casadevall, "Why We Cheat", Scientific American Mind, May/June 2013, p.32-36.