Are Cheaters Always Going To Be Cheaters

The research followed 2-thousand participants over three years, having them play a series of games that measured dishonesty. According to the results, cheating isn’t just the result of a mistake, it’s a part of someone’s personality that never goes away.

When participants played games they were told study authors couldn’t check to see whether their response was truthful or not.

• They could get away with lying about their answers and no one would know, and it turns out, many of them did. Over and over again over the three-years.
• Researchers found that if someone cheated in the first game, they were way more likely to cheat in the second and third games.
• Those who cheated were a lot more likely to do it again, no matter what the stakes or context were.
• But the reverse was also true, those who were honest in game one were much more likely to be honest in the other games.

Study authors found two big predictors of chronic dishonesty: low scores in something called “Honesty-Humility” and high scores in the “Dark Factor,” which is a combination of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy personality traits. They also found if someone lies easily and often, it might just be who they are and not a momentary lapse in judgment.