The Science is Settled: Cheaters Prefer Government Work

Cheating students more likely to want government jobs, study finds

Researchers ran a series of experiments with more than 600 students finishing up college in India. In one task, students had to privately roll a die and report what number they got. The higher the number, the more they would get paid. Each student rolled the die 42 times.

Although researchers do not know for sure if any one student lied, they could tell whether the numbers each person reported were wildly different than what would turn up randomly -- in other words, whether there were a suspiciously high number of 5s and 6s in their results.

Cheating seemed to be rampant: More than a third of students had scores that fell in the top 1% of the predicted distribution, researchers found. Students who apparently cheated were 6.3% more likely to say they wanted to work in government, the researchers found.

“Overall, we find that dishonest individuals -- as measured by the dice task -- prefer to enter government service,” wrote Hanna and coauthor Shing-yi Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Bear in mind, this was in India; but it would be an amusing test to run at the Harvard Law School as well.

The experiment was carefully rigged so that no student could be directly accused of cheating; some unlikely scores should occur, but approximately 30% cheated enough to be in the expected top 100%.  Given school these days, where cheating is assumed to be a rampant problem, I don't think this result was any shock.  Hell, it was just a silly psychology study, why not collect a little extra beer or contraception money?

And the fact that those who cheated were about 6.3% likely to think that government employment was a good use of their skills?  Six percent doesn't seem like a very large percentage; I'm surprised it was significant.  Still, they probably made a good choice, given their apparent proclivities.