“Does Competitive Winning Increase Subsequent Cheating?”, 2022-08-03 (; backlinks):
In this preregistered study, we attempted to replicate and substantially extend a frequently cited experiment by 2016, suggesting that winners of pairwise competitions are more likely than others to steal money in subsequent games of chance against different opponents, possibly because of an enhanced sense of entitlement among competition winners.
A replication seemed desirable because of the relevance of the effect to dishonesty in everyday life, the apparent counterintuitivity of the effect, possible problems and anomalies in the original study [being low on statistical power], and above all the fact that the researchers investigated only one potential explanation for the effect.
Our results failed to replicate 2016’s basic finding: we found no evidence to support the hypotheses that either winning or losing is associated with subsequent cheating. A second online study also failed to replicate ’s basic finding.
We used structural equation modeling to test 4 possible explanations for cheating—sense of entitlement, self-confidence, feeling lucky and inequality aversion. Only inequality aversion turned out to be statistically-significantly associated with cheating.
…This study also included an investigation, using SEM, to test the hypotheses that winning is associated with a latent variable that we labeled ‘pride’, indicated by self-confidence, a feeling of luckiness, and a sense of entitlement, and that pride is associated with subsequent cheating, or that losing is associated with a latent variable of ‘shame’, indicated by a sense of entitlement and inequality aversion, and that shame is associated with subsequent cheating. We measured all the indicator variables with psychometric scales that showed high reliability in our study, and the only statistically-significant association that emerged was between inequality aversion and cheating. This suggests that participants who were least inequality-averse were most likely to cheat in the coin-flip game, whether they had won or lost the previous competitive perceptual task. The association of inequality aversion with cheating was not strong, but it is worth investigating experimentally. It may reflect a more general sense of fairness among participants who are inequality averse. If those who value fairness strongly tend to be inequality averse and also construe cheating as a form of unfairness, the association would be explained, but that explanation requires further experimental evidence.