Social Influences on Cheating in Collectivistic Culture

Cheating has become a global problem that is ubiquitous in various facets of human life. While previous literature has suggested a link between cheating and competition, another type of social relation, that is, collaboration, could arguably promote cheating behavior, particularly with a sample of participants who held collectivistic values. To examine whether competition, collaboration, or a combination of both caused participants to overreport the dice score, we designed a novel experimental dice-rolling paradigm in a lab setting. Across 4 studies, we found that collaboration but not competition triggered potential cheating behavior. Participants were inclined to overreport their scores when they were paired with cheating partners; this pattern was not evident when they did it individually or when they were paired with honest partners. This behavioral change was also accompanied by a change in participants’ perception of the experimental conditions. Furthermore, we found that the dice score overreporting behavior was exclusively contingent upon their partner’s influence. In a collectivistic society, potential cheating seems to be triggered by collaboration as opposed to competition, as previous literature has suggested. Our findings suggest that the determinant of potential cheating behavior is rather culturally specific.