Abstract:
People like to think of themselves as more honest than the person sitting next to
them. In practice, this cannot always be the case. Through two experiments, we
investigated behavior in golf—a sport of self-governance, where the player is frequently
confronted with opportunities to bend the rules and the score. Our research shows that
people believe the average person will cheat more often than they themselves do,
responding more strongly to both a decision’s perceived degree of dishonesty and the
likelihood of being caught. We also found that altering the level of a competition did not
change people’s beliefs about their dishonest behavior, even though cheating was directly
related to competitiveness. In general, controlling for certain characteristics produces
consistent predictions of reported cheating levels, and adding certain external
circumstances drastically changed participants’ perceptions of dishonesty. People like to
think of themselves as being in complete control of their decisions, but we will show that
their perceptions can be changed without actually altering the terms of the decision.
