A previous high-profile study found that winning did not cause people to cheat.
According to a 2016 paper by Israeli researchers, winners of skill-based competitions are more likely to steal money in subsequent games of chance against different opponents as opposed to people who don't see themselves as winners or loser.
The study proposed that a sense of entitlement encourages cheating.
The original findings have been discredited by an expanded and enhanced study by researchers at the University of Southern California.
People with a strong sense of fairness cheated less if they had previously won or lost.
The lab-based dice-rolling game and the basic coin-tossing game were identical to the original study. Standard statistics were used to analyze the results.
Just as in the original study, researchers found a small amount of cheating for the financial rewards. Winning did not increase cheating or increase the sense of entitlement.
The only factor that could account for the small amount of cheating was the quality of the people involved.
People don't like inequalities. People with a strong sense of fairness are less likely to cheat because they view the practice as a form of unfairness.
The lead author of the new study was Andrew Colman, a professor of psychology at the University ofLeicester.
"Cheating and general dishonesty are of growing concern in the light of academic dishonesty in the digital age, problems of tax avoidance and evasion by wealthy people in developed economies, and more generally effects of widening inequality in wealth and income on corruption and crime."
We wanted to duplicate the findings of the 2016 study with large sample sizes because we were surprised by them. The small samples of the original study don't have the power to make conclusions.
It turned out that neither winning nor losing had any effect on cheating. The data we provided gave a clear answer to the question.
More information: Does Competitive Winning Increase Subsequent Cheating?, Royal Society Open Science (2022). DOI: 10.1098/rsos.202197. royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202197 Journal information: Royal Society Open Science
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