Bending the Curve

The United States is number one among industrialized countries in income inequality. Right now, our wealth distribution is more unequal than at any time since the 1920s.

I believe that inequality is one of the most important dimensions that separates societies that work well from those that don't. One way societies break down is when people cheat. In an unequal society, the stakes are higher. The differences between the lives of rich and poor people are greater, and the social safety net protecting the poor is, well, porous. In this competitive environment, some people may decide the end justifies the means and behave dishonestly. Two recent studies support this reasoning. Unfortunately, American white collar criminals don't usually volunteer to be studied by social scientists, so we'll have to settle for college students (some of whom will no doubt “grow up” to be white collar criminals).

A new study by Lukas Neville examines a ubiquitous form of academic dishonesty, plagiarism—specifically, purchasing research papers over the internet. Google Correlate publishes anonymous summaries of the frequencies with which various search terms are used, aggregated by state. Neville measured six queries such as “buy term papers,” used between 2003 and 2011. States were ranked for inequality using the standard economic measure, the Gini coefficient. The analysis factored out common sense control variables such as the number of college students in the state. The result was a significant positive correlation between state level inequality and dishonesty—the greater the inequality, the greater the attempted plagiarism. Income inequality accounted for about 10% of the variance in this form of cheating.

Neville's study also measured generalized trust using questions such as whether “most people can be trusted,” taken from six state-level surveys. Trust was negatively related to both inequality and dishonesty. A mediational analysis suggested that trust mediates the relationship between inequality and cheating. (See my earlier post on IQ and racism for an explanation of how mediational hypotheses are tested.) Although correlation does not imply causation, the data are consistent with this interpretation: In an unequal society, people don't trust their peers to behave honestly. Therefore, they themselves decide to cheat, either in conformity to what they perceive to be a norm of dishonest behavior (“everybody does it”), or to protect themselves from other cheaters (“if I don't plagiarize, my grades will suffer”).

A recent experiment by Gino and Pierce also found a relationship between inequality and cheating. In this study, the authors created inequality before the experiment began by conducting a lottery in which half the participants were randomly given $20. For purposes of this study, those who got $20 were called "rich" and those who did not were "poor." The students then performed a task in which one of them attempted to solve anagrams for monetary prizes, while another graded the solver's performance. Graders could cheat by incorrectly reporting their partner's score. The researchers were able to detect any dishonesty. Since each student was randomly assigned a partner, there were four types of pairs: rich solver-rich grader, rich solver-poor grader, poor solver-rich grader, and poor solver-poor grader.

Most of the cheating occurred in the two conditions of unequal wealth. In the rich solver-poor grader condition, the graders attempted to hurt the solvers by understating their performance. In the poor solver-rich grader, helpful cheating occurred. The graders overstated the solvers' scores. The authors (correctly, I believe) interpreted these results as a confirmation of equity theory. The initial lottery violated an implicit norm that all experimental participants should be paid equally. Equity was restored by taking money away from the “rich” or giving more money to the “poor.”

This study is less relevant to the consequences of income inequality than the plagiarism study, since the inequity resulted from a specific event (the lottery) and the cheating was intended to hurt or help a specific person (the beneficiary or the victim). While it is important that specific inequities be corrected, I believe income inequality results in a more general dishonesty in which the beneficiary is oneself, there is no specific intended victim, and the victims are always hurt. Examples would include cheating on your income tax, burying hidden charges in contracts (“gotcha!”), or lying in political advertisements. After 40 years as a college teacher, I'm well aware of how internet plagiarism has eroded the quality of campus life. Would there be less of it if college students graduated with less debt and were more confident they could get a good job after graduation?