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Comment by souldeux | Hacker News Reader

The study is a bit more interesting than this title suggests.

>An intervention aimed to discourage participants from choosing the cheating-enabling environment based on social norm information did not have the expected effect; on the contrary, it backfired. In summary, the results suggest that people low in moral character are likely to eventually dominate cheating-enabling environments, where they then cheat extensively.

In other words: we tried to tell the cheaters "you wanna cheat? fine, you can only play with the other cheating pieces of crap." The intent was for this to be a punishment, but it turns out they like it. The strategy backfired.

Don't dismiss this as a "well duh" thing, there's cool stuff in here!

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Let's substitute cheating with something else in your sentence.

"So you wanna compete as a road runner? Fine, you can only run with other competitive runners."

See where that is going?

Cheaters don't care about other cheaters being there; they either think they can out-cheat them, or else that the other cheats don't matter: there is enough of a bonanza there that all cheaters can win, and in fact more is left if non-cheaters are eliminated.

wait, but no. the goal of the runner is probably to get better at running not just winning whatever the cost.

someone who wanted to win no matter the cost even if it made them over the long run worse at running would probably find way to disqualify better runners or some other methods that doesn't necessarily involve enjoying running.

the difference between what you're describing and the the scenario is a difference between instrumental and intrinsic goals

The intent was to create an analogy between the motivation to cheat and some other motivation (not involving cheating).

Let's assume that the goal of the cheater is likewise to get better at cheating, and that cheaters intrinsically enjoy cheating.

Not only that, but being aware of the environment as being "cheating-enabling" means that when they lose the cheaters can blame the competitor having better cheats, rather than having lost because they're a worse player.

I win? I'm the better player!

I lose? They had an advantageous cheat!

That is because the "good people leave" is not punishment, it is often reward for cheaters. They got rid of who they see as risk-averse petty nitpicking loosers.

Sure it's cool but I don't see what's unexpected about it. So long as the reward is the same and the cheating is mostly effortless, I don't see why a cheater would prefer to play against honest people and have to compete against genuine skill versus a cheater competing against other cheaters.

If the reward were a function of how honest the environment/population was and cheaters still preferred the dishonest environment, then I'd find that to be interesting... but if the reward is mostly the same regardless of the nature of participants, then I don't see why cheaters would prefer to play against honest individuals.

I also don't think this finding generalizes very well, for example when cheating still requires a great deal of effort on the part of the cheater. For example take a competitive sport that is notorious for cheating, cycling. I'd be surprised if cyclists who take performance enhancement drugs would prefer to compete against other cyclists who use those drugs compared to competing against cyclists who don't use drugs.

Find me a study that comes to that conclusion and I'll be a lot more interested.

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