The disadvantage of not knowing cheating: What happens when you're smarter than you really are

Honesty is appreciated, but also has its advantages lie, even when we lie to ourselves. Several studies have shown that people who practice the "art" of deception can be more successful in sports or business. They are often even happier than people who do not lie to himself. Researchers have found, however, a major drawback of cheating in life.

Zoe Chance of Yale University tested to see what happens when people deceive themselves.

Several students were asked to participate in an evaluation were tested general knowledge and IQ. Half of the participants received an evaluation sheet which was, at first mistakenly answers at the bottom of the page. They had to resist the temptation to not check answers.

A shortcut for non-resistive

As expected, some of them could not help but cheat. In the entire group that had access to the right answers, the results were better. The students were chosen at random. Researchers can not assess whether some of them would know the answers and not cheat, so they assumed that better results might be due to cheating or smarter individuals.

The question that researchers were interested in was whether people who cheat are aware that were based on answers or if they only attribute success to test their intelligence.

Therefore, the study participants were asked to predict how they will do a second test. Li was allowed to look over the questions. Those in the group who cheated noticed that this time missing answers. Researchers have theorized that once it finds no answers, the group predicts that will fare poorly on this test.

The results indicated otherwise. Deception won. People who cheated were more confident in their abilities and were expected to perform 10% better in the second test. In reality, they had poor results.

Basically, they were tricked into believing that they are better than they were. There are some benefits to this approach related to self-esteem. On the other hand, if certain circumstances change, the deception could result in a bad evaluation of their skills.

Source: BBC

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