Analysis Of Cheating At The End To Avoid Regret

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Research Article: Cheating at the End to Avoid Regret
How do people behave when they face a number of chances to cheat with little or no risk of exposure? In this summary I will present the results of 4 studies made to determine whether or not people take advance of opportunities to cheat. This experiment is important to companies and institutions to know more about their employees and/or students’ behaviors when exposed to situations when they can or have a chance to cheat, if most institutions understand the behavior related to cheating and opportunities to so do, they can be more prepared to avoid this type of situations, and eventually to catch them.
Organizations and policymakers that want to prevent unethical actions may only have limited …show more content…

3. Slippery Slope
People are more likely to approve of behavior that crosses an ethical line gradually rather than abruptly. Moral standards have eroded.
The three alternative explanations suggest that people cheat more at the end because they previous cheating opportunities have made them feel that they have earned the right to cheat, exhausted their self-control, or acclimated them to cheating. However, in this experiment the researchers decided to hold the number of previous cheating opportunities constant and manipulated the number of remaining opportunities, so they exposed two hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1: People will be more likely to cheat when they think that no more cheating opportunities remain.
Hypothesis 2: Anticipatory regret about passing up a last opportunity for enrichment will make people more willing to cheat when they think that no more cheating opportunities remain.
To prove the two hypothesis the researchers present the participants with a series of opportunities to cheat, but then surprise them with an additional series of cheating opportunities. To increase their interest in participating the contributors obtain $.10 for each flip of a coin, but only if the side up of the coin is “heads”. The participants have the opportunity of flip the coin 7, 10 or 13 times, the flipping of the coin happens privately, and they are told not to cheat. The researches then tried to prove the hypothesis in 4 …show more content…

Within this set, the investigators randomized how many trials the participants would complete: 7, 10, or 13. Then, they were giving the chance to do 3 or 6 more trials and were ask to record their results.
Results
More than 50% of people reported wining on most trials, indicating that some people cheated. In contrast with a cheat-at-the-end effect, the most cheating occurred on the last flip of the coin whether they have 7 or 10 the report winning trial was mostly the last one. However, when giving 13 trials, the contestants were more likely to cheat on trial 10 even though they were 3 trials away from completing 13 trials.
• Study 2
Method
Participants completed 20 trials of the coin-flipping task; the instructions led them to expect that there are 10 trials total, 20 trials total, or that the number of trials are randomly determined. The cheat-at-the-end effect predicts more cheating on Trial 10 because the contestants would think they have only 10 chances to flip the coin.

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