Source: Dori via Wikimedia Commons

A growing amount of research demonstrates that most people consider themselves to be honest, and yet—given the chance—they will take an opportunity to cheat a little in their favor. People fudge time sheets to add a little extra time that they did not actually work. They don’t always pay for coffee at the company break room. They don’t correct a billing error in their favor at a store or restaurant.

A paper in the September, 2015 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Daniel Effron, Christopher Bryan, and Keith Murnighan suggests that people cheat more at the end of a sequence of tasks than on earlier trials.

In one study, participants were recruited using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, so they were working from their own home without any oversight. They were told that the experimenters were interested in testing telekinetic powers. So, participants were supposed to flip a coin and try to influence it to come up “heads” (half of the participants were told to influence it to come up “tails”). They would get 10 cents additional payment for every flip that came up as they wanted it to. They reported the outcome of each coin flip after they made it.

All participants flipped the coin 13 times. However, some participants were told they were going to flip it 7 times. After the 7th flip, they were told they had 6 bonus flips. A second group was told that they were going to flip the coin 10 times (and then they got 3 bonus flips). A third group was told they were going to flip 13 times. This way, each group thought that their last trial was going to be at a different place in the sequence.

If participants were telling the truth, then on average they ought to report heads about 50% of the time. Overall, participants cheated. There was a tendency to report heads more than 50% of the time. There was also a tendency to cheat more on (what people thought was) the last flip. So, participants who expected 7 flips cheated more on the seventh flip (reporting heads about 65% of the time) than those who expected 10 or 13 flips. Participants who expected 10 flips cheated more on that flip (also reporting heads about 65% of the time) than those who expected 7 or 13 flips. There was a tendency for everyone to the 13th flip (reporting heads about 58% of the time).

In another study, a group imagined what it would be like to participate in this study. They also reported they would cheat more on the very last flip. In addition, participants were asked a number of questions about why they would cheat. People often reported that they would regret not getting the extra payment, which led them to cheat.

One final study looked at individual participants more closely. In this study, participants graded essays on-line. They were given the chance to fill in a time sheet saying how long they spent on each essay. They were paid by the minute. The program used to run the study calculated how long participants spent grading the essays, so that it was possible to compare the amount of time people billed for the essay to the amount of time they actually worked.

In this study, some participants graded 7 essays and others graded 10 essays. They were told in advance how many they would do. Participants grading 7 essays overbilled an extra minute and a half for their last essay, while those grading 10 essays overbilled only about 30 seconds for their 7th essay. The amount of overbilling for participants completing 10 essays went up steadily over the course of the study.

These studies suggest that there is a tendency for people to cheat a little when there is no oversight of their performance. They consistently report a little extra in their favor. However, the tendency to cheat is magnified on the very last trial. People seem to want to take one last chance to get an extra payment, and so they cheat to avoid regret.

Of course, people do not cheat rampantly. They generally have a of being honest people, and they do not want to violate that image strongly. So, they cheat a little around the edges instead.

Finding out that people tend to cheat can be disheartening. The real question is whether we should look at this as the glass being half empty or half full? In these studies, there were no real consequence to cheating. People were not going to get caught. Yet, they largely told the truth. The over-reporting of coin flips and time on task was actually fairly small. So, while people embellish a bit, they are largely accurate in what they report.

Follow me on Twitter.

And on Facebook and on Google+.

Check out my new book Smart Change.

And my books Smart Thinking and Habits of Leadership

Listen to my radio show on KUT radio in Austin Two Guys on Your Head and follow 2GoYH on Twitter and on Facebook.