
People Are More Likely to Cheat at the End - dnt404-1
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-are-more-likely-to-cheat-at-the-end/
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MBlume
Towards the end of an iterated prisoner's dilemma, your opponent has fewer
upcoming opportunities to punish you, and so you may as well defect
(especially since your opponent may be thinking the same thing). The
interaction in the study really doesn't resemble an iterated prisoner's
dilemma, but this may still explain why people instinctively defect more as an
ongoing interaction is nearing completion.

~~~
linhchi
The interaction resembles a repeated PD because people are cheating the
experimenter :D

The ending effect happens all the time in experiments. If people play the
repeated prisoner's dilemma, they'd cooperate UNTIL the last round. If people
play the public good game, they'd contribute generously UNTIL the last round.

Because if the prioner's dilemma and public good game are played one shot, the
rational thing to do is to cheat right away (defect / not contribute). Being
cooperative (in hope to make the world a better place) goes against the
selfish motives.

So, at the last round, because there is no tomorrow, it's just like the game
is played one-shot, people'd cheat. The theory of game goes too far to say
that, if people are rational, they work the game backward (backward induction)
and at the 9th round, they'd cheat, and at the 8th round, they'd cheat...->
they'd cheat right from the first round.

But experiments show that people are myopic or at least dont cheat right in
the first round, they wait until last round. Because of experiments, theorists
have to add the social image. Social image can be built in the first 9 round,
but in the last round, not anymore.

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joe_the_user
It's fascinating the number of plausible arguments people come up with for
this behavior.

One that occurs to me if that someone has unlimited tosses, then the number of
correct guesses doesn't matter that much for their "expected income stream" \-
if they want more money, they can just toss more coins instead of cheating.
And oppositely, if the experiment is coming to an end, the only way to get
more money is by cheating and so now the incentive to cheat becomes a factor.

This isn't fundamentally that different than kazinator's approach [1] but it
is a little different.

The position I take on all this is that psychological experiment always
involve some particular, reproducible series of behaviors that are then given
an abstract intuitive interpretation (distorting heads-tails results becomes
"cheating-in-the-abstract"). But naturally any particular behavior actually
can have legion abstract interpretations and explanation. I suspect only a
much large collection of behaviors and abstraction interpretations could serve
as a real compelling explanation. The problem is the intuitive human "toolbox"
of abstract explanation - such as "cheating"(in the abstract) might not be the
real toolbox we need to use to explain human behavior.

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223289](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223289)

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Amorymeltzer
Are we "owed" money beyond what we earned from the coin flips or essay
grading? Maybe not but perhaps we feel that way. One analysis of the "wasted
employee time" due to slacking off with solitaire and the like - clearly this
is an old study - found it was basically a way for employees to only do the
amount of work they felt they were being paid for. A little way of getting
back at the employer for being, as they felt, underpaid.

Which is to say, I wonder if this effect might change if the participants were
offered more money?

~~~
biot
Or autonomy: tell participants they need to design their own coin-flipping
experiment, then perform, measure, and report the results. They still might be
underpaid on a $/time basis, but with a greater investment in the process I
suspect they'd have a certain amount of pride in ensuring accurate results.

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kazinator
People are likely to cheat toward the end for a different obvious reason:
namely that their estimate of impending poor success more and more accurate as
the end nears, and so the pressure to _do something_ to improve the outcome
increases.

(This is in a different setting, when there is some limited time to achieve
some predetermined, measurable goal.)

When the pressure sets in is when people start cutting corners, and that can
come simply from being closer to a deadline while lagging in progress.

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universe520
Really interesting research. I definitely felt something similar when I came
to the end of a job recently, after three years in post. I didn't sabotage
anything but I did relax a little more and maybe I wasn't as productive as I
had been previously, which you could say was 'cheating' slightly.

~~~
vanderZwan
That is almost exactly what Daniel Ariely's research on dishonesty is about,
this notion of cheating so slightly you don't feel guilty about it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBmJay_qdNc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBmJay_qdNc)

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wylee
> This is reassuring for those optimists out there, as it suggests that people
> are often honest even when they don’t have to be.

Or it could be that people don't realize there's no way for the experimenters
to know if they're cheating, so they're on their best behavior until they
become familiar with the system.

I think this is true in a lot of domains (jobs, dating, etc). In the
beginning, people follow the rules. When they're comfortable with the ins and
out of the system, they start gaming it.

~~~
frame_perfect
You didn't read the article.

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im3w1l
The more time you are to remain in a context, the higher the risk of being
punished.

~~~
frame_perfect
This is probably the reason.

