What Makes People Cheat?

Are you a cheater? You may not think so. Sure, you may not be perfect, but you probably consider yourself a reasonably honest citizen.

But think harder. In high school or college, did you ever swipe a paper off the Internet and hand it in as your own? Ever padded your resume with a misleading or outright false job description? Have you taken an extra deduction or two on your taxes, maybe writing off a dinner with friends as a business expense? Do you really pay for that deluxe cable line-up, or is your hook-up not quite legit?

If you're guilty of any of these sins, you're not alone. Experts in many different fields -- education, sports, and law, for instance -- believe that cheating has become more common and more accepted in recent years.

"We've got scientists and professors who cheat, journalists who cheat, lawyers who cheat, and CEOs who cheat," says Charles Yesalis, MPH, ScD, a professor of health and human development at Pennsylvania State University. It seems like everybody's doing it.

If cheating is more common, the question is, why are we more likely to cheat than previous generations? And what does cheating do to us? How does it harm our society, our families, and ourselves?

Is Cheating Really Worse These Days?

Experts say some amount of cheating is inevitable in any culture. When the first human beings set out the first rules for ethical behavior, there was no doubt some scheming wretch who started working out ways to bend them.

But levels of cheating in a society can rise or fall, says David Callahan, author of The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead and co-founder of the public policy center Demos. He and other experts think that they're on the rise. It's hard to find definitive numbers to establish that cheating is more common across the board -- after all, can you trust a survey of liars? But there are good surveys of academic dishonesty, and the results are not reassuring.

"Over the long haul, there's certainly been an increase in cheating [in school]," says Donald McCabe, professor of management and global business at Rutgers Business School and founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity. Some of McCabe's own surveys of college students have shown a 30%-35% increase in some types of cheating during the 1990s.

Yesalis has studied the use of performance-enhancing drugs in athletes for more than 25 years and worked as a consultant for the U.S. Olympic Committee, the NCAA, the NFL, and many other organizations. He says the problem has only gotten worse and worse.

"For the last 20 or 30 years, we've had this idea that there are only a few bad apples in the barrel," Yesalis tells WebMD. "But in reality, in many, many different sports, there are only a few good apples."