When Cheating Makes Us Think We're Smart

Students cheat in school. In other shocking news, the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east. There's more to cheating than the fact that it happens, though; here's an interesting blog post that describes current trends in cheating.

A new study by Zoë Chance, Michael I. Norton, Francesca Ginob, and Dan Ariely investigated how people interpret their own cheating. They compared two groups. Participants in the control group:

• Took a test.
• Made a prediction about how they'd do on a second test.
• Took a second test.

Participants in the "cheating" group did the same, but during the first test, the answers were printed at the bottom of the test.

• Took a test on which they could cheat
• Made a prediction about how they'd do on a second test.
• Took a second test.

The cheating group did better on the test 1 because they looked at the answers. In other words, they cheated. The groups did equally well on test 2 because neither group could cheat.

What's interesting is the predictions. Both groups knew they wouldn't be able to cheat on test 2, which used different questions than test 1. You would think the cheating group would predict that they wouldn't do as well on test 2 as they had on test 1 because they wouldn't be able to cheat. They should probably predict they'd do no better on test 2 than the control group. But that's not what happened.

The cheating group's predictions were significantly higher than were the control group's. In other words, getting answers right by cheating made people think they were smart. The authors put it this way:

We find that those who exploit opportunities to cheat on tests are likely to engage in self-deception, inferring that their elevated performance is a sign of intelligence. This short-term psychological benefit of self-deception, however, can come with longer-term costs: when predicting future performance, participants expect to perform equally well—a lack of awareness that persists even when these inflated expectations prove costly.

These results add to ample evidence that people are adept at deceiving themselves.

Stability Bias

The results also fit with an important bias in how people make predictions about future tests. In a nutshell, we make predictions about future tests based on our current memory state. What's going to happen in the future doesn't necessarily come into the prediction equation at all. And this can produce crazy results.

One of my favorite examples is when a test will take place. People predict they'll do equally well on a test whether it will be in 10 minutes or a week (or even a year)! This bias can produce huge amounts of long-term overconfidence.

This stability bias can also help explain why people think they'll do better after cheating. They make judgments based on how they just did on the test. They don't take into account what will be different about the test in the future. So they don't take into account whether or not they'll be able to cheat.

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