Is cheating the kind of thing we do?

Or is it the kind of thing those other people do?

In the car yesterday, I caught a story on Marketplace that was looking for insight into why people on Wall Street cheat. In the piece, host Kai Ryssdal interviewed Duke University behavioral economist Dan Ariely about research conducted (with college students, of course) on cheating.

The set-up was that the students were asked to solve a set of math problems, and that they'd be paid (50 cents) for each one they got correct. While it sounds like some of the students were only paid after they completed the set of problems, other groups of students were given an envelope of money up front and told after completing the problems (and checking the answers) to return the money in excess of what they earned for their correct answers.

When it was a matter of returning the money they hadn't earned, some of the students cheated. (Or at least, they didn't return as much money as they should have. Maybe the weak math skills that resulted in mistakes with the math problems also resulted in a miscalculation of how much they had earned? Although if that were the case, you'd figure there would be students returning too much money also.)

But here's the part that got my attention:

Ariely: The most interesting thing is that we had a student that we hired, an acting student at Carnegie Mellon, who stood up after a few seconds and said "I solved everything," -- clearly cheating because nobody can solve all these questions in 30 seconds -- "What should I do?" And the experimenter said, "If you finished, go home." Now, what will this create? Will people cheat more or cheat less? Well, it turns out it depended on what kind of sweatshirt he was wearing.

Ryssdal: I'm sorry, what kind of sweatshirt?

Ariely: Yes, what kind of sweatshirt.

Ryssdal: OK.

Ariely: Here's the story. We ran this at Carnegie Mellon, in Pittsburgh. And in Pittsburgh there are two universities: Carnegie Mellon, University of Pittsburgh. All the students who participated were Carnegie Mellon students. If the cheating student, the acting student, was wearing a Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, he basically got people to cheat more. But if he was wearing a University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt, he got people to cheat less. What is basically happening here is that when he stood there with a Carnegie Mellon sweatshirt, he gave a social justification for a new social norm to emerge about cheating. But when he was wearing a University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt, all of the sudden people said, "This is cheating. This is what the other people in the bad school are doing. This is not what we're doing." And therefore cheated actually less.

Please set aside questions of how many universities Pittsburgh actually has, or of whether the University of Pittsburgh is a bad school except in the consciousness of a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate.

Rather, consider what this result suggests about how people evaluate whether cheating is permissible: If someone from my group is doing it, it's OK for me to do it. On the other hand, if someone from another group -- one that my group wants to see itself as better than -- does it, then I (and others in my group) will scrupulously avoid doing it because we're better than that.

I'm not entirely sure what a result like this says about the effectiveness of exposure and shunning of wrongdoers in the tribe of science. (Especially because I think exposure of mistakes might be the first step to rehabilitation of the scientists who made those mistakes, I worry about setting up groups of "bad actors" and "good actors" where group memberships are taken to be more or less permanent.)

However, I do think these results suggest that a lot of the bad behavior we see in the tribe of science may have been "learned at home" -- if not at the knee of the mentor, then from some other scientist identified as an important player or a rising star. If you see misbehavior from someone who everyone in your group tells you is a serious scientific talent, doesn't it seem natural to conclude that this behavior is really OK?

This is yet another reason for scientists, especially those involved in training new generations of scientists, to be very clear about how misbehavior can hurt the shared body of scientific knowledge and the scientific community that needs to work together to produce and test that body of knowledge.

Scientists are humans, subject to temptations to cut corners or to gain an advantage over the competition, and even people with lots of scientific talent sometimes display bad judgment. But if we're serious about getting the scientific job done, we need to try to be better than that.