Summary: New field research indicates that cheating for personal financial gain is driven more by an individual’s inherent propensity to cheat than by short-term changes in economic conditions. The study found that periods of scarcity did not increase cheating when participants personally benefited.
Source: Texas A&M
Is cheating shaped by environment or by character?
Dr. Marco Palma, director of the Human Behavior Lab at Texas A&M University and professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics, and Dr. Billur Aksoy, assistant professor of economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, investigated whether economic scarcity affects people’s willingness to cheat for monetary rewards. Their two-period lab-in-the-field experiment with low-income coffee farmers in a remote Guatemalan village compared behavior during a harvest-driven income “abundance” period and during a non-harvest “scarcity” period to isolate the effect of temporary changes in income.
The study tested whether cheating arises from circumstances—such as poverty or seasonal low income—or from stable, individual-level tendencies. The authors used a controlled die-roll reporting task that let participants increase payment by privately misreporting outcomes, allowing the detection of dishonest reporting at the group level while keeping individual responses anonymous.
THE DESIGN OF THE EXPERIMENT
Researchers visited a small village whose household income depends primarily on coffee sales. The harvest season spans roughly five months when farmers sell beans weekly and experience higher income; the remaining seven months provide little or no coffee income and represent the scarcity condition. The same subjects were tested twice: once during the low-income (scarcity) period and again during the harvest (abundance) period.
Participants were given a cup and a single die and asked to roll the die in private twice, reporting only the first roll. Reported rolls determined payment: a roll of 1 paid 5 quetzales, 2 paid 10 quetzales, 3 paid 15 quetzales, and so on, with a roll of 6 paying nothing. Because rolls are random, each face should appear about one-sixth of the time; deviations from that distribution indicate dishonesty in reported outcomes.
KEY FINDINGS: CHEATING FOR PERSONAL GAIN
When participants personally received the payment, the percentage of high-paying reports was far greater than the one-sixth expectation in both scarcity and abundance. The researchers observed approximately 90% high-payoff reports in both periods, indicating substantial cheating that did not vary with economic conditions. In other words, short-term scarcity did not make people more likely to cheat for themselves; the propensity to cheat appeared stable across the two income conditions.
CHEATING ON BEHALF OF OTHERS: IN-GROUP VS OUT-GROUP
The study also explored whether people would misreport outcomes to benefit others. First, participants were allowed to allocate payments to an in-group member (a family member or friend from the village). Overall, participants cheated to benefit in-group members, though at a somewhat lower rate than when cheating for themselves. This tendency did not change meaningfully between scarcity and abundance.
Next, participants had the opportunity to report dishonestly in order to benefit an out-group stranger outside the community. Behavior toward out-group recipients differed by period. During the abundance period, reported outcomes for out-group beneficiaries matched the expected 50% split between high- and low-payoffs (i.e., no evidence of cheating). During scarcity, however, the distinction between in-group and out-group narrowed: participants began to cheat for out-group strangers at rates similar to their cheating for in-group members.
INTERPRETATION AND IMPLICATIONS
The most striking result is that individual cheating for personal gain remained high and unchanged across scarcity and abundance, which suggests an innate or stable component to dishonest behavior in these contexts. However, scarcity did influence how social boundaries affected cheating: under scarcity, the moral or social barrier that typically discourages cheating for strangers weakened, so people were equally likely to cheat on behalf of outsiders as they were for friends or family.
“This experiment helped bridge the gap between the lab and the real world, and we can inform policymakers and make accurate predictions of how humans will react under different types of environments,” Palma said.
Dr. Aksoy noted that similar patterns have appeared in other field studies. She reported that scarcity did not significantly change cheating when participants personally benefited in a different experiment with rice farmers in Thailand. Additional cross-country research also finds limited variation in cheating across many countries, suggesting these patterns may generalize beyond a single community, though more research is necessary.
FUNDING AND NEXT STEPS
The Human Behavior Lab at Texas A&M recently received a grant, co-led by Drs. Catherine Eckel and Jonathan Meer in the economics department, to continue studying cheating behavior. Follow-up experiments are planned within the United States to test whether the same relationships between scarcity, in-group favoritism, and cheating hold in other socio-economic and cultural settings.
Source:
Texas A&M
Media contact:
Laura Muntean – Texas A&M
Image source:
Image in the public domain.
Original research:
“The effects of scarcity on cheating and in-group favoritism”, Billur Aksoy and Marco A. Palma. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization. DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2019.06.024
Abstract (summary)
The authors used a two-period lab-in-the-field experiment with low-income coffee farmers in an isolated Guatemalan village to study how seasonal income changes affect cheating and in-group favoritism. Using a die-roll reporting task, they found high levels of cheating when subjects personally benefited in both scarcity and abundance periods, indicating no noticeable effect of scarcity on self-directed cheating. When benefiting others, in-group favoritism was present during abundance but disappeared during scarcity, and the result held even when favoring an in-group member involved a direct monetary cost.