“UNDER capitalism”, ran the old Soviet-era joke, “man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite.” In fact new research
suggests that the Soviet system inspired not just sarcasm but cheating
too: in East Germany, at least, communism appears to have inculcated
moral laxity.
Lars Hornuf of the University of Munich and Dan Ariely, Ximena
García-Rada and Heather Mann of Duke University ran an experiment last
year to test Germans’ willingness to lie for personal gain. Some 250
Berliners were randomly selected to take part in a game where they could
win up to €6 ($8).
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My other car is a Porsche
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The game was simple enough. Each participant was asked to throw a die 40
times and record each roll on a piece of paper. A higher overall tally
earned a bigger payoff. Before each roll, players had to commit
themselves to write down the number that was on either the top or the
bottom side of the die.
However, they did not have to tell anyone which
side they had chosen, which made it easy to cheat by rolling the die
first and then pretending that they had selected the side with the
highest number. If they picked the top and then rolled a two, for
example, they would have an incentive to claim—falsely—that they had
chosen the bottom, which would be a five.
Honest participants would be expected to roll ones, twos and threes
as often as fours, fives and sixes.
But that did not happen: the sheets
handed in had a suspiciously large share of high numbers, suggesting
many players had cheated.
After finishing the game, the players had to fill in a form that
asked their age and the part of Germany where they had lived in
different decades. The authors found that, on average, those who had
East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in
West Germany under capitalism. They also looked at how much time people
had spent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The longer
the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the
likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers of high rolls.
The study reveals nothing about the nature of the link between
socialism and dishonesty. It might be a function of the relative poverty
of East Germans, for example. All the same, when it comes to ethics, a
capitalist upbringing appears to trump a socialist one.
#Source:
The more people are exposed to socialism, the worse they behave | THE ECONOMIST
Jul 19th 2014
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