The growing culture of cheating to get ahead can only becountered by making virtue a habit
Heres the spin to end all spin, though I suspect it probablywont. An email arrived the other day telling the story of JudyWallman, a Californian woman working on her family tree. She haddiscovered an ancestor in common with a leading US senator and wroteto find out what he knew about their great great uncle.
What she didnt tell him was that she had found a photograph ofthe man standing on the gallows on the back of which was written:Remus Reid, horse thief, sent to Montana Territorial Prison 1885,escaped 1887, robbed the Montana Flyer six times. Caught byPinkerton detectives, convicted and hanged in 1889.
The senators staff replied thus: Remus Reid was a famous cowboyin the Montana Territory. His business empire grew to includeacquisition of valuable equestrian assets and intimate dealings withthe Montana railroad. Beginning in 1883, he devoted several years ofhis life to government service, finally taking leave to resume hisdealings with the railroad. In 1887, he was a key player in a vitalinvestigation run by the renowned Pinkerton Detective Agency. In1889, Remus passed away during an important civic function held inhis honour when the platform upon which he was standing collapsed.
Now thats real political spin, Judy concluded.
Except it isnt spin. Its a lie, or an urban myth if you want tobe more charitable. When I checked it out I discovered it had alsobeen used by opponents against George Bush and Sarah Palin. Even so,it tells a poetic truth: that we live, both politicians and theirdetractors, in a cheating culture.
Theres a lot of it about. In just the past few days weve had asurvey of 10,000 youngsters, aged 13 to 15, which shows that aquarter believe it is fine to cheat in an exam and almost as manythat its OK to travel on public transport without a ticket; and itsgetting worse, with a 29 per cent rise over the past decade in thenumbers who think shoplifting is acceptable.
Then three exam boards, including Cambridge, introduced an anticheating computer programme which detects whether a lot ofcandidates are getting the same mark by copying. There was even asurvey which showed that when women are given flowers by theirhusband they suspect hes been up to something.
The fear is that we may, as ever, be going the way of the UnitedStates where academic surveys routinely show that 75 to 80 per centof students do not think, in this internet age, that cheating inessays or exams is wrong. Its not just cutting and- pasting.American websites with names such as cheathouse.com offer tens ofthousands of off-the-peg college essays or scholars-for-hire towrite one. There is even a plagiarism checker called Viper whichclaims to scan 10 billion resources to check whether the bespokeessay you pay for has itself been plagiarised.
What is most shocking are the brazen attitudes of studentssurveyed by researchers: Everybody does it, a person who lives anentirely honest life cant succeed these days, and people cheat intheir relationships, in sport, on their mortgage applications andtaxes cheating in school is a dress rehearsal for life.
Psychologists have coined a term for this: neutralisation ofdeviance.
We admit such behaviour is, in general terms, wrong but say thatspecial circumstances make it OK for me to ignore the rule. We selfjustify, they say, by denial of injury, denial of the victim,appeals to higher loyalties, denial of responsibility, andcondemnation of the condemners.
I only cheat in subjects I wont need later in life; no one loses;I only do it to get grades that will please my parents; if I didnt,Id be at a disadvantage because everyone else cheats.
Post-modernism has made this worse by insisting that there areonly viewpoints and no objective moral truth. To many students allmeans are morally equivalent, says Gary Pavela, who wrote the Codeof Academic Honesty being brought in by many US universities. Thisis sophisticated amorality: Grades are more important than integritywhich is not a virtue in itself. The ultimate question is not, Am Ian honest person? but, Will this behaviour prevent my mastery ofmaterial I will need to become a competent professional?
This takes us back to a Hobbesian world view which pays no regardto the unfairness done to those who dont cheat or to the widerdamage to society done by an erosion of trust.
That way lies Enron and the world which David Callahan set out inhis book The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong toGet Ahead, with its Winner Class, so influential they areeffectively are exempt from many rules, and an Anxious Class forwhich cheating becomes a kind of entitlement in the race to keep up.
There are distinct national attitudes to cheating, much as HenryKissinger once noted that football teams reflect stereotypes aboutnational character. The English and Germans, countries with strongtraditions of political sobriety and solidarity, stress collectiveeffort. But in Southern Europe or Latin America, where individualshave needed to survive on their own wits economically, guile andgamesmanship are emphasised. It is why Spanish footballers fall overa lot when tackled or Argentinians are so adept at dissimulation.
But can better ethics be taught?
Money & Morals, the organisation which conducted the survey of10,000 British youngsters, thinks so. It provides materials to bringthe teaching of honesty, integrity and social responsibility intoall subjects. Over in the States, by contrast, the director of theEthics Institute at Dartmouth College, Dr Aine Donovan, who iswriting a book called Reconstructing Honor, thinks teaching ethicsoften leaves students with the view that ethics is a matter of whatone can (or cannot) get away with.
Yet colleges which have Academic Honesty codes report thatcheating falls. One college which makes students copy out the codeeach term gets particularly improved results.
But morality is better caught than taught.
One college set up an experiment which gave a group mathsproblems to solve for cash. One student was set up to rise from hisseat and say, impossibly early, that he had done them all. He wasgiven the cash, told to throw his answers in the bin and leave.Heres the good bit. If that student was wearing a sweatshirt bearinghis colleges name, other students followed his lead in cheating. Ifhe was wearing the rival college shirt, far fewer of the otherscheated too.
Group loyalty trumps personal gain. Perhaps there is a lesson inthat when it comes to creating an environment where dishonesty issocially unacceptable. Aristotle, always a better model than poorHobbes or the utilitarian Mill, suggested that virtue lies not inrationality, duty or utility but in character. Moral virtue, hesuggested, is a habit. It seems we need to make it the habit not ofthe individual but of society.
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