Failure™ Magazine

Cheating Culture

Why more Americans are doing wrong to get ahead.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Life

In the new Hollywood movie The Perfect Score, six high schoolers concoct a plan to steal the answers to the S.A.T. (Scholastic Aptitude Test), each student under the impression that the only way to avoid being unfairly judged is to cheat the powers-that-be. Although the plot is fiction, the film illustrates an increasingly common sentiment—that it’s okay to cheat if you perceive that the system is stacked against you. Beset by cynicism and intense pressure to keep up with one’s peers, seemingly moral individuals are resorting to cheating at school and work in hopes of leveling the playing field.

In his recent book “The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong To Get Ahead” (Harcourt), author David Callahan examines economic and cultural changes that have prompted the rise in cheating over the past two decades. Relying on qualitative evidence more than hard-to-find quantitative data, Callahan—co-founder and Director of Research at the New York-based public policy center Demos—explores not only how and why more people are cheating for private gain, but postulates what can be done to reverse the trend. While the book’s predominant message is troubling the outlook isn’t necessarily bleak. As Callahan notes in the preface, “Much cheating, as we’ll see, can be traced to conditions that we have the power to change….”

What was your motivation for writing a book about cheating?
This is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I had long been interested in values and had noted that for the last two decades the values debate in this country has been very narrowly framed by conservative moralists. Then a couple of years ago I was writing a book on the Harvard Business School class of 1949—this group of guys who grew up in the Depression and fought in World War II and went to Harvard on the GI Bill. Many of them went on to lead the big companies of the post-war era. I was talking to them around the time those Enron and WorldCom scandals were erupting, and these guys were really appalled. They were saying that this kind of thing would have never happened in an earlier era because corporate leaders had different values. There was less greed; there was less cutthroat competition. It got me thinking broadly about whether American values had really changed that much.

Around the same time, I started noticing that business wasn’t the only sector experiencing scandal. The Stephen Ambrose flap was occurring with this historian caught in a big plagiarism case, there was that flap about the Princeton admissions office breaking into the Yale admissions office’s computer system, and I noticed a spate of articles about tax evasion. There was cheating all over the place. So I set out to write a book that explored the question: Is there really more cheating, and if so, why?

Can you define “cheating” as you see it?
I look specifically at people who see themselves as honest citizens—and most of their life would confirm that self-identity—but are cutting corners and breaking rules to get ahead professionally or financially. I’m not concerned with criminals and I’m not interested in adultery. I also don’t look at corruption in politics and cheating in that sphere, because I feel like that’s been so exhaustively covered.

So a key distinction here, just to put a finer point on it: In the area of insurance fraud you have people who are staging accidents in order to make money, and then you have people who get into an accident and inflate their claim with the insurance company. That’s the difference. It’s hard versus soft fraud.

Do you think there is more cheating taking place nowadays? Or does the media simply highlight it more than in the past?
Well, I place this in a historical context and see this as a cyclical phenomenon in American history. There’s always been cheating in America. But we go through these periods where the country becomes more focused on getting ahead financially, more enraptured by greed and money, and sometimes our culture gives people a sense of greater license to do whatever it takes to achieve wealth. I think the ’80s and ’90s have been such a period, I think the ’20s was such a period, and the robber baron era was similar. So I do think that in the grand historical scheme we’re in one of those periods.

In terms of the specific types of cheating there is evidence of increased cheating in a few key areas. Tax evasion is certainly up now compared to 15 or 20 years ago. The IRS has tracked tax evasion with this formula known as the tax gap and has charted a large increase in tax evasion over the past decade. There is a lot of good evidence about increased cheating among high school and college students which has been collected through large surveys. For example, in 1992, 61 percent of high school students acknowledged that they had cheated within the past year, whereas in 2002 that number was up to 74 percent. Also, there is some good data about increased workplace theft in certain areas. In the late 1990s compared to the early ‘90s more employees did such things as abusing their expense accounts and corporate credit cards. Then in sports there’s a pretty wide consensus that the steroid problem in baseball is much worse today than it was a decade ago. All players and observers of the game agree on that. Of course, in the area of business there’s no question that the late ’90s saw a level of dishonesty and a pervasiveness of dishonesty around earnings reports that was unprecedented. In other areas it’s harder to nail down what’s been going on. I believe that structural conditions in the area of law and medicine have led more professionals in those fields to break the rules of their profession. But there’s less good data there so it’s more of an inference.

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