Consider This from NPR - Chess, Fishing, Irish Dancing: Cheating Scandals Reveal Why We Care About Cheating

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Cheating allegations have rocked many worlds over the last few weeks.Chess, fishing, poker, and even Irish dancing.These 'sports' cheating scandals have attracted a lot of attention lately.Maurice Schweitzer is a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.He studies emotions, trust and ethical decision making and says that our reaction to cheating might tell us something deeper about human nature and why we care about people cheating to get ahead.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR comes from NPR member stations and Eric and Wendy Schmidt through the Schmidt Family Foundation, working toward a healthy, resilient, secure world for all on the web at theschmidt.org. So a new sports scandal overtook the internet about a month ago. It's a scandal rocking the chess world. Wow. What a result. Now, before you ask, yes, chess is considered a sport by the International Olympic Committee. The chess world holds a handful of tournaments each year, like the Sinkfield Cup in September. And on September 4th, chess grandmasters Magnus Carlsen and Hans Niemann faced off in person. Magnus Carlsen is 31 years old and from Norway. He's considered one of the greatest chess players of all time.

At one point, he played 10 chess players at the same time looking the other way, so he couldn't see the boards. I mean, just think about it. 10 chess boards that he has in his mind every second. I mean, that is incredible. And his opponent, Hans Niemann, is a bit of a newcomer. At 19 years old, he is the sixth highest-rated junior chess player. And during the Sinkfield Cup, Niemann beat Carlsen, which was shocking.

Even more so because Carlsen then pulled out of the tournament altogether. It must be embarrassing for the world champion to lose to me. Shortly afterwards, Carlson posted a cryptic tweet that seemed to allege that Neiman had cheated in their match, sending the chess world into a tizzy. Days after the match, Neiman denied the allegation in an interview with a commentator at Sinkfield. This is a targeted attack. And if you look at my games, this is not, it has nothing to do with my games. Now, one of the most common ways people cheat at chess is by using a chess engine. This is a computer program that shows you the strongest moves. Niemann admitted in that same interview

that he had cheated online when he was between 12 and 16 years old, but he said he never cheated for prizes. And he never cheated in over-the-board chess, which is in-person chess. I wanted to gain some rating. You know, I just wanted to get higher ratings so I could play stronger players. So I cheated in random games on chess.com. Now, I was confronted. I confessed. And this is the single biggest mistake of my life. But the story took a turn when Carlsen and Niemann met for a rematch in an online tournament two weeks later. After just one move, Carlsen turned off his webcam. The game started and Magnus has logged off. What has happened? People watching the live stream of the game and the chess commentators were stunned.

Magnus has resigned the game against Hans Niemann. Yes, at least that's what it says in our transmission. Everyone was confused. Why did Carlsen pull out? Well, a few days later, the 31-year-old put out a statement on Twitter saying that he believes Niemann has cheated a lot more than he has admitted. And that is why Carlson pulled out. Chess commentators and fans started to make videos about this whole drama. Like, I will say it is very hard to believe that Magnus Carlson

could lose to Hans Neiman while Magnus is playing the white pieces. But Hans has had a very, very dramatic rise, which is very much outside the norm. Now, keep in mind, I am not suggesting anything, but I think the fact that he's had such a big rise... And then, just this week, a report released by Top Chess website, Chess.com, revealed that while he may not have cheated over the board with Carlson, Neiman likely cheated more than a hundred times in online games on their site, including for prize money, which contradicts Neiman's earlier claims.

Big timers in the chess world weighed in. Grandmaster Maurice Ashley says the most disturbing part of the chess.com report was that dozens of grandmasters have been caught cheating online, including four of the world's top 100. And Ashley believes this scandal, it goes beyond chess. I think the biggest thing that's missing from the conversation is actually how widespread the problem is in society as a whole. Consider this. A cheating scandal in a small corner of the sports world has sparked a much larger conversation about cheating, why we do it, and why we find it so offensive. Because it makes sense that unethical people are cheaters, and that's a simple and appealing and perhaps comforting worldview.

The idea that all of us at least have the potential to stretch the truth or convince ourselves of a different reality that's friendly to our own perspective and priorities, that maybe is a little bit more daunting. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Friday, October 7th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Support for NPR and the following message come from Carnegie Corporation of New York,

working to reduce political polarization through philanthropic support for education, democracy, and peace. More information at carnegie.org. It's Consider This from NPR. Now, in the past few weeks, we have seen alleged cheating in fishing competitions, poker, even Irish dancing. Go figure. But, you know, these juicy stories aren't just fodder for gossip and memes. They could say something larger about all of us. Samuel Summers is a professor of psychology at Tufts University, and he says there are a lot of reasons people cheat.

Whether that's winning, whether that's getting money, whether that's getting status and attention and so forth. When you look at something like sports or someone playing a game like chess, winning, it is the ultimate goal. Sports is an inherently competitive venue, right? And so certainly in a competitive venue, you're more likely to see people stretching the rules, pushing the envelope. And so for some players, they will win by any means necessary. Ironically, at some level, some of the same characteristics we celebrate in athletics, sort of a never-say-die attitude, exceeding all limitation and being able to survive against the wilting threat of competition.

Those might be some of the very same characteristics that make someone more likely to try to stretch the rules. And when sports fans want their team to win, there is a history of people looking the other way. I live in Boston now, and you could go to Yankees-Red Sox games at Fenway Park several years ago and hear fans chanting steroids and other things against Roger Clemens or Alex Rodriguez, players on the Yankees, while they're wearing like a Manny Ramirez or a David Ortiz jersey, both people who tested positive at various points in the testing protocol for Major League Baseball. Maurice Schweitzer is a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and he agrees that our culture, in a way, encourages cheating. So when we have a win-oriented culture, we diminish our focus on other things.

And if winning becomes the dominant goal, then the way we win becomes less important. And as Schweitzer points out, a lot of us cheat or lie in some way. You know, clearly people will cheat for economic rewards like prize money or promotions. People will also cheat for the accolades they get, so the likes or the adulation that they get. But there's a third factor, which is what we've called the cheater's high. When people outsmart a system or they do something they know they shouldn't. So, for example, celebrities who

engage in stealing or shoplifting, when we see people steal a car for a joyride or somebody hacks into the Pentagon just to say that they've done it. There's something about the thrill of outsmarting another person or outsmarting a system where we don't always feel guilty and bad about unethical behavior. And I think that's really an important feature that helps to explain why some people are attracted to engaging in some unethical behavior. I mean, I want to be clear here, too. Not all cheating is equal, right?

Like as a kid, when I was playing hide and seek, I could be known to peek while people were hiding. Tell me, what do you think the difference is between say like that kind of cheating and cheating at competitive chess? Yeah, well, that's an interesting question. So where do we draw that line? And there is, you know, when we're playing poker, I'm expecting you to bluff. I'm expecting you to mislead me. Or negotiations, when somebody says, well, my budget is only $100,000, we're expecting that not to be completely true. There are lines that are crossed where, you know, ideally in a culture or in explicit rules, there are clear things that we do and don't do. And I think part of the problem that you're getting at is that in many cases, there are murky lines.

Now, when it comes to cheating at chess, yeah, clearly you're not supposed to use artificial intelligence or other people's help to guide your move, that's clearly beyond the pale. So I think some people will be unsure of exactly where the line is. But in other cases, people have clearly stepped over the line. And they know that what they've done isn't acceptable. It is interesting how like there's been such a visceral reaction from the public over the last few weeks over all these cheating scandals popping up. I mean, some people out there sure don't care or they're just eating up the drama. But there are a lot of people who are like deeply disappointed. They're shocked. they're disgusted. Let's talk about those people. Like, why do you think we get so indignant and riveted with cheating scandals? Well, partly, we have a moral value for

fairness. And we care about a lot of different moral values. So we might have a moral value for loyalties, for benevolence. There are different moral values that we have. For some people, fairness is a really primal value. And maybe it's from the way they were brought up, or maybe it's from the sports they played as kids. When somebody seats and creates an unlevel playing field, we see that as extremely unfair. And it also sakes our understanding, in this case, of what's really happening. So we see two people playing chess, for example, and we only realized later that one of them was AI-assisted. And now we're challenged to think about, hey, what was I really witnessing? What's really happening?

I mean, another dimension here, who's now been able to trounce the leading expert in tests. So it's something sort of fundamental about intelligence, where, yeah, we might have known that computers were pretty good, but now we're seeing a computer-assisted person beating and outsmarting the world's best. I mean, cheating gets sort of even more fascinating at the very, very elite level of sports because the gradations between who comes out first place, second place, third place, they're just such small margins. And I imagine someone who's trying to be competitive is thinking every edge that I can gain matters. And so it justifies a certain amount of,

I don't know, they might not call it cheating. They call it strategy, technique. Right. That's right. At very high performance levels, every small bit matters. It's not like a mid-level manager that's trying to increase sales by 10% or something. Here, if you're number one versus number five, that's a pretty big difference. Also for these people, this competitive pressure, it's hyper-competitive. There are huge gains for winning. And as I alluded to before, when we have this win orientation, when winning becomes the priority, we're sacrificing so much. And these elite athletes have already sacrificed so much that winning has displaced a lot of other really important values. And you'll see famous people saying, you know, Tom Brady talking about how he's missed weddings, he's missed birthdays. He sacrificed so many things that to ask someone to sacrifice something else that could be related to their ethics may go along with everything else that they've sacrificed in order to be that win. I'm wondering, you know, because I know that you focus on cheating in your scholarship. Does that or has that made you more or less optimistic about human nature in the long run? So curious. You know, that's a great question. You know, even though I've seen a lot of disturbing

behavior, I remain very optimistic. I've found, for example, people who are wavering between pleading or being honest, when they know their counterpart is being honest with them, I've seen that tip people to be more honest. I've seen how interventions can change people's behavior. And when people feel as if that's the norm, that's what people are doing, they become far more likely to engage in the right behavior. I mean, also, fundamentally, most people most of the time are both very trusting and trustworthy. And we're seeing a lot of trust being well placed.

And overall, I'm very optimistic. That was Maurice Schweitzer, professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. The reporting you heard at the top of this episode came from producer Brianna Scott. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ilsa Chang. Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org