Cheating: The Act of Purposeful Lying

Indeed, other research shows that cheating behavior is partly heritable within the context of the personality trait “Honesty-Humility” (Kleinlogel, 2018):

The personality factor of Honesty-Humility captures variation in sincerity, fairness, greed-avoidance, and modesty. Ashton and Lee (2007, p. 156) defined Honesty-Humility as “the tendency to be fair and genuine in dealing with others, in the sense of cooperating with others even when one might exploit them without suffering retaliation.” Negative adjectives representing low levels of Honesty-Humility include greedy, conceited, pretentious, and sly. Honesty-Humility has been shown to be partly heritable (Lewis & Bates, 2014), and the stability of personality by adulthood suggests that Honesty-Humility is largely exogenous and can be modelled as a predictor of outcomes.

Youth, Cheating and Lying

Apologies to Gen X’s, Gen Y’s and those Gen Alpha’s – but the news is not good about your cheating behavior. Curtis and Hart’s (2023) research suggest that age combined with “dark triad” personality types are more likely to lie and be dishonest in other ways (like cheating):

Age is probably the biggest factor (that defines being a liar). If we look at the frequency of lying across the time, across the lifespan, lying seems to peak in late adolescence. So it kind of gradually increases throughout childhood, peaks in late adolescence and then slowly declines across adulthood. So age is certainly the factor that we’ve identified so far that seems to be the strongest predictor of lying.

Then we also have personality traits. So your listeners are probably familiar with the dark triad personality traits, all these different malevolent personality traits, those tend to be associated with lying. Looking at kind of big five personality traits, we find that people who are low in agreeableness and high in neuroticism are more likely to lie. And then finally, people who have low self-esteem or are much more inclined to lie than those who have higher levels of self-esteem.

This insight is helpful to coaches to be aware of behaviors and dialogue that suggests low self-esteem thinking and behaviors that suggest dark triad personality types, such as lack of remorse for being caught out for lying, or for lack of empathy for those who might have been harmed from unethical behaviors.