Fool me once, shame on you. Fool myself, and I may end up feeling smarter, according to a new study led by Sara Dommer, assistant professor of marketing at Penn State.
Dommer wondered why people cheat on tasks like completing crossword puzzles or Wordle and counting calories when the rewards are purely intrinsic, like feeling smarter or healthier. She found that when cheating offers the opportunity to improve self-perception, individuals engage in diagnostic self-deception - that is, they cheat yet deceive themselves by attributing their heightened performance to their innate ability instead of the cheating. She published her findings in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
"I found that people do cheat when there are no extrinsic incentives like money or prizes but intrinsic rewards, like feeling better about yourself," Dommer said. "For this to work, it has to happen via diagnostic self-deception, meaning that I have to convince myself that I am actually not cheating. Doing so allows me to feel smarter, more accomplished or healthier."
Dommer conducted four studies to determine if people will cheat when rewards are solely intrinsic and what drives the feeling of accomplishment despite the cheating. In the first study, 288 undergraduate students received menu information about three days' worth of meals - like three pancakes with butter - and were tasked with entering calorie information into a food-tracking app. The students were divided into two groups, with one group receiving additional calorie counts accompanying the meal descriptions.
The app listed five potential calorie options for each food entered. For example, the calorie counts for three pancakes with butter ranged from 300 to 560 calories. The group without specific calorie information could have averaged the five options to compensate for the missing information and get a better idea of the true caloric value of each meal, according to Dommer. Instead, participants in this group tended to enter fewer calories than the group that received specific calorie information, suggesting that people will cheat for intrinsic benefits, in this case feeling healthier.
The second study included 195 participants recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk. These participants were divided into two groups - a control group and a cheat group - and asked to complete a 10-question, multiple choice IQ test. Those assigned to the cheat group were told that correct answers would be highlighted so they could keep track of their progress. After the exam, participants in the cheat group were asked to enter the number of questions they got correct, while the control group had to estimate their scores. Then the program graded both groups' tests, and participants were asked to predict their score on an additional 10-question IQ test, this time one that did not allow for the possibility to cheat.
