Does competition enhance performance or cheating? A laboratory experiment

Abstract

Does Competition Enhance Performance or Cheating?A Laboratory Experiment *In this paper we experimentally test whether competing for a desired reward does not only affect individuals' performance, but also their tendency to cheat. Recent doping scandals in sports as well as forgery and plagiarism scandals in academia have been partially explained by "competitive pressures", which suggests a link between competition and cheating. In our experiment subjects conduct a task where they have the possibility to make use of illegitimate tools to better their results. We find that women react much stronger to competitive pressure by increasing their cheating activity while there is no overall sex difference in cheating. However, the effect of competition on women's cheating behavior is entirely due to the fact that women, on average, are doing worse with respect to the assigned task. Indeed we find that it is the ability of an individual to conduct a particular task and not sex that crucially affects the reaction to competition. Poor performers significantly increase their cheating behavior under competition which may be a face-saving strategy or an attempt to retain a chance of winning.JEL Classification: C91, J24, J31, M52

License to Cheat: Voluntary Regulation and Ethical Behavior

“…Thus, the greater avoidance of regulation and misreporting by women appears to be context-specific and limited to environments in which women are competitively disadvantaged. In this vein, our results share features with recent findings by Schwieren and Weichselbaumer (2010), who found that women engaged in cheating behavior more often than men, but that this was less related to a gender difference than to differences in ability.…”

Do higher achievers cheat less? An experiment of self-revealing individual cheating

“…It may be argued that the competitive reward structure of our experiment is to blame for driving a large number of subjects to overcome their moral feelings and cheat maximally. However, Schwieren and Weichselbaumer (2010), who used a web maze game to test the hypothesis that competition enhances cheating, did not find a significant difference between the number of mazes falsely reported to have been solved by the competitive and non-competitive treatment. Still, in the computerized maze game subjects could not tell whether or not their competitors were cheating, whereas in our experiment cheaters could easily be seen using their smartphones.…”

“…Subjects' self-grading was then compared with their actual scores to reveal cheating. Schwieren and Weichselbaumer (2010) asked 65 students to solve, under competitive and non-competitive settings, as many mazes as they could in a maze game offered on Yahoo's website and record their achievements in a table. Subjects' records were then compared with the number of mazes actually solved using a spyware program that secretly monitored subjects' performance.…”

Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up: The Long-Term Impact of Government Ideology and Personal Experience on Values

“…Even in ancient Greece and Rome, athletes experimented with substances such as mushrooms or bull's blood in order to increase the likelihood to win sport contests (cf. In addition to theoretical explanations for why athletes cheat, there exists experimental (Schwieren and Weichselbaumer, 2010), qualitative (Smith et al, 2010;Boodworth and McNamee, 2010) as well as non-experimental quantitative (Humphreys and Ruseski, 2011) studies seeking to explain doping prevalence and attitudes. Obviously, athletes view the use of banned performance-enhancing substances as "unnatural" and "cheating," while legal performance-enhancing substances are considered "essential" for success (Smith et al, 2010, p. 181).…”