I’m posting this here for the benefit of my sister – she’ll probably stumble across it here. But you might enjoy it too 
Cheating is a thin slice of human nature that doesn’t change. We can grow up, but we can’t grow out of it.
We want something. Our experience tells us it is a good thing (for us).
What are we willing to do to get this ‘good’ thing?
Two stories to read:
Story 1 (Two parts): A father seeing his son cheat at Candyland and teaching him a lesson. (Hat tip – The Old New Thing)
Story 2: Marvel comics fighting the heirs of Jack Kirby for the characters that will (perhaps) revert to his estate in 2014 (we’re talking Spider-Man here)
These are the same story to me.
In the first story a child wants to win because it feels good. That feeling is a good thing, and he is willing to do what he can to get it. It doesn’t matter that the game is no longer fair and that the other people are forced to lose.
In the second story someone (I don’t know who is right) wants to make millions of dollars. That money is a good thing, and they are willing to do what they can to get it. It doesn’t matter what the truth is or that they are lying about the nature of the original agreement.
A terrifying discussion of cheating can be found at the freakonomics blog. Read the comments; don’t stop until you at least hit comment #39. It frightens me because of the soullessness of the calculations, and it illustrates exactly how tolerent we are of cheating.
We?
Yeah, I mean me. I can vividly remember cheating on a spelling test in second grade. It was self marked (the things we do in the name of logistics) and as the teacher read out the correct answers, I silently erased my incorrect entries and wrote the correct ones down, putting a check mark beside them.
I wanted to receive recognition and I wanted to receive favour. It felt good.
But it felt real bad when the teacher asked me afterwards, “Did you change these answers?”
More recently when a colleague asked me if I’d performed a certain necessary task, I said, “Yes, of course.” Not having done the task would have said bad things about me; it would have meant admitting I wasn’t all that and more. After all, if I did it *before* our discussion, or did it *after* our discussion – what did it matter?
But I hadn’t done the task, and it felt real bad when I had to go back and confess that I had lied to him.
I’m constantly surprised at my own willingness and desire to cheat and deceive.
Yes, a subject *dear* to my heart
. While I applaud parents trying to teach their child not to cheat, I don’t think cheating yourself and then lying about how it all went down is really the way to go! They were prouder of putting one over him than they were convinced the lesson was going to stick in the long run. Confessing to cheating, and then asking how that impacted him might have gone further in the long run.
Sadly, I have caught a lot of kids cheating who did view it much more like a game than a moral transgression – oops, you got me. Any sorrow (but generally no remorse) came from realizing there were real consequences to their actions. In a morally relativistic society cheating is very easy to rationalize – similar to lying, which was also something many students did without feeling it was a moral decision, per se.
One exception to that was from a student I caught helping someone else cheat – I told him I was really disappointed in him, and he almost cried. I was a bit surprised. I think that the realization that what he had done reflected on his rep in my eyes did make a difference to him.
I never (that I recall) cheated in school, but I’ve definitely been a cheater in other ways…
I wasn’t referring to score-keeping, by the way, but when I proof-read the story after posting I realized it had, shall we say, “overtones.”
I just thought you might like the a story about parenting.
I agree that they could have handled it better. There’s a difference between things that feel good and things that are good, and that has to be made clear. It’s not enough just to say, “Don’t cheat because it’s bad.” There has to be a reason *why* it is bad. A real reason, not just a rationale.
The scary thing (as evidenced by the freakonomics link) is that often even the rationale is lacking – people cannot explain *why* cheating is bad – they even think it is good, clever and commendable!
I think our best defense against cheating is compassion – an understanding of real harm and the primary consideration of others before ourselves. That completely preempts cheating.
The kid who feels remorse is the one who has a relationship with you, because they understand that they have lost something of real value and worth – trust – and that they have caused real harm.