next question is: which force is more likely to overpower the other in more standard group interactions?
To answer this question, we needed to create an experimental setting that was more representative of how group members interact in a normal, day-to-day environment. You probably noticed that in the first two experiments, our participants didn’t really interact with each other, whereas in daily life, group discussion and friendly chatter are an essential and inherent part of group-based collaborations. Hoping to add this important social element to our experimental setup, we devised our next experiment. This time, participants were encouraged to talk to each other, get to know each other, and become friendly. We even gave them lists of questions that they could ask each other in order to break the ice. They then took turns monitoring each other while each of them solved the matrices.
Sadly, we found that cheating reared its ugly head when we added this social element to the mix. When both elements were in the mix, the participants reported that they correctly solved about four extra matrices. So whereas altruism can increase cheating and direct supervision can decrease it, altruistic cheating overpowers the supervisory effect when people are put together in a setting where they have a chance to socialize and be observed.
LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS
Most of us tend to think that the longer we are in a relationship with our doctors, accountants, financial advisers, lawyers, and so on, the more likely it is that they will care more deeply about our well-being, and as a consequence, they will more likely put our needs ahead of their own. For example, imagine that you just received a (nonterminal) diagnosis from your physician and you are faced with two treatment options. One is to start an aggressive, expensive therapy; the other is to wait awhile and see how your body deals with the problem and how it progresses (“watchful waiting” is the official term for this). There is not a definite answer as to which of the two options is better for you, but it is clear that the expensive, aggressive one is better for your physician’s pocket. Now imagine that your physician tells you that you should pick the aggressive treatment option and that you should schedule it for next week at the latest. Would you trust his advice? Or would you take into account what you know about conflicts of interests, discount his advice, and maybe go for a second opinion? When faced with such dilemmas, most people trust their service providers to a very high degree and we are even more likely to trust them the longer we have known them. After all, if we have known our advisers for many years, wouldn’t they start caring about us more? Wouldn’t they see things from our perspective and give us better advice?
Another possibility, however, is that as the relationship extends and grows, our paid advisers— intentionally or not—become more comfortable recommending treatments that are in their own best interest. Janet Schwartz (the Tulane professor who, along with me, enjoyed dinner with the pharmaceutical reps), Mary Frances Luce (a professor at Duke University), and I tackled this question, sincerely hoping that as relationships between clients and service providers deepened, professionals would care more about their clients’ welfare and less about their own. What we found, however, was the opposite.
We examined this question by analyzing data from millions of dental procedures over twelve years. We looked at instances when patients received fillings and whether the fillings were made of silver amalgam or white composite. You see, silver fillings last longer, cost less, and are more durable; white fillings, on the other hand, are more expensive and break more easily but are more aesthetically pleasing. So when it comes to our front teeth, aesthetics often reign over practicality, making white fillings the preferred option. But when it comes to our less visible back teeth, silver fillings are the way to go. 3
What we found was that about a quarter of all patients receive attractive and expensive white fillings in their hidden teeth rather than the functionally superior silver fillings. In those cases, it was most likely that the dentists were making decisions that favored their own interests (higher initial pay and more frequent repairs) over the patients’ interests (lower cost and longer-lasting treatment).
As if that weren’t bad enough, we also found that this tendency is more pronounced the longer the patient sees the same dentist (we found the same pattern of results for other procedures as well). What this suggests is that as dentists become more comfortable with their patients, they also more frequently recommend procedures that are in their own financial interest. And long-term patients, for their part, are more likely to accept the dentist’s advice based on the trust that their relationship has engendered.*
The bottom line: there are clearly many benefits to continuity of care and ongoing patient-provider relationships. Yet, at the same time, we should also be aware of the costs these long-term relationships can have.
HERE’S WHAT WE’VE learned about collaborative cheating so far:
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! In our initial experiments, both the cheater and the partner benefited from every additional exaggeration of their score. So if you were the cheater in the experiment and you exaggerated the number of your correct responses by one, you would get half of the additional payment and your partner would get the same. This is certainly less financially rewarding than snagging the whole amount for yourself, but you would still benefit from your exaggeration to some degree.
To look into purely altruistic cheating, we introduced a condition in which the fruit of each participant’s cheating would benefit
Why might this be the case? I think that when both we and another person stand to benefit from our dishonesty, we operate out of a mix of selfish and altruistic motives. In contrast, when other people, and only other people, stand to benefit from our cheating, we find it far easier to rationalize our bad behavior in purely altruistic ways and subsequently we further relax our moral inhibitions. After all, if we are doing something for the pure benefit of others, aren’t we indeed a little bit like Robin Hood?*
FINALLY, IT IS worthwhile to say something more explicit about performance in the many control conditions that we had in this set of experiments. For each of our cheating conditions (individual shredder, group with shredder, distant group with shredder, friendly group with shredder, altruistic payoff with shredder), we also had a control condition in which there was no opportunity to cheat (that is, no shredder). Looking across these many different control conditions allowed us to see if the nature of collaboration influenced the level of performance. What we found was that performance was the same across all of these control conditions. Our conclusion? It seems that performance doesn’t necessarily improve when people work in groups—at least not as much as we’ve all been led to believe.
OF COURSE, WE cannot survive without the help of others. Working together is a crucial element of our lives. But clearly, collaboration is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it increases enjoyment, loyalty, and motivation. On the other hand, it carries with it the increased potential for cheating. In the end—and very sadly—it may be that the people who care the most about their coworkers end up cheating the most. Of course, I am not advocating that we stop working in groups, stop collaborating, or stop caring about one another. But we do need to recognize the potential costs of collaboration and increased affinity.
The Irony of Collaborative Work
