Finding the Line on Cheating
“You’re a CHEATER!”
The words rang out to a group of maybe 10 watching a doubles tennis match I was playing in a tournament in south Florida. Everybody stopped talking. Uh oh. Something big was happening.
My doubles partner had called a serve out and one of the guys on the other side was having none of it. “That was in!”
“No, it was out,” my partner said, circling a ball mark in the clay with his racket. The mark looked out to me too.
Professional tennis took line calls out of the hands of humans, but in amateur tennis calls are on the honor system. They provide a litmus test for all of us. How much does it mean to us to win?
“You’re a liar,” the opponent said.
“Where is this going?” my partner, a licensed psychologist, asked him.
“Oh, so you’re a tough guy,” said the opponent, getting close to the net and raising his racket. “Ya wanna go?”
“Ya wanna go?” Did he actually say that?
Now would be a good time to mention that the four people on the court were all more than 65 years old. We were playing in a tournament of like-aged people with no prize money on a random Wednesday afternoon in Naples, Florida.
Earlier in the day Israel and Hamas had announced they had negotiated a ceasefire in their bitter war. And somehow we were about to get into a fight over a call in a tennis match?
It was actually the second accusation of cheating I’d heard that day. The other came in a match among two 80-year-old players in a singles match. One of them, a friend of mine, called his opponent’s ball out. The opponent disagreed. My friend showed him the mark. The opponent pointed to a different mark. They called in an official, and for the next hour an adult supervised their match, making sure no blood was spilled.
To an outsider, these moments may sound absurd. But let’s acknowledge two things. First, there has always been cheating in sports (who can forget Eupolus of Thessaly, who famously fixed boxing matches at the Olympics in 380 BC?). Second, this time we are living in sure seems to be ripe for cheating of all kinds.
“Bag-gate” rocked the cornhole world in 2022. Is nothing sacred?
It’s certainly a creative time for cheating in sports. In just the past couple of years, there have been credible allegations of cheating in chess (illegal use of computers); fishing (contestants stuffing weights inside dead fish to win tournaments); step dancing (not sure what that is, but apparently teachers have been rigging competitions for their students); NASCAR and F1 (illegal equipment); cornhole (undersized bean bags); and professional poker (a “hidden vibrating device” used to help a player win big hands).
Our cheating tendencies go well beyond the world of sports, of course. In 2022, the Miss USA contestants walked off the stage, believing Miss Texas had won in rigged voting.The percentage of people admitting to marital cheating has increased from 14% in 2014 to 21% by the end of 2020.
The temptation to cheat starts early in life. A 1928 study of children found that, given the opportunity, almost all of them would cheat on a variety of tests if there was a reward involved. Nearly 100 years later, another study found that the overwhelming majority of college students cheat academically in some way or another, with substantial increases over the past few years as online classes and improvements to AI have made it harder to get caught.
Maybe students are taking their cues from their professors. Harvard President Claudine Gay was forced out last year, in large part because of questions about her quoting other people’s research without proper attribution. In other cases, professors have been discovered to be inventing data to support conclusions they wished were true.
Duke Professor Dan Ariely, who studies cheating, notes that everyone, given the opportunity, will cheat just a little – he calls this “the fudge factor” – but that once a cheater sees the gains from cheating grow, the temptation to cheat more will grow larger.
That makes sense to me. Lance Armstrong began experimenting with small amounts of EPO, then escalated as he found he could get away with it and that the doping paid off. Most academic fraud cases seem to start with a sloppy footnote or a slightly faked result. Then, if nobody says anything, they escalate.
But it’s hard not to feel the tension of Ariely speaking as an analysts on cheating. He’s now in the middle of his own cheating scandal, accused of completely fabricating an important study. Does he have personal knowledge of the temptations to cheat?
Cheating persists because at every level there are attractive incentives for winning.
Financial, often. You can get a lot of money for winning the Tour de France or even a big fishing tournament. Publishing an academic paper with surprising findings helps get you tenure or a promotion. A dollar saved by underreporting taxes is another dollar you can spend. And in almost every field experts estimate many more people get away with the cheating than are caught – the odds are ever in the cheater’s favor.
But the arguments for cheating can be convincing even when the stakes are nonmonetary. Here’s how I think the decision to cheat might happen in the kinds of tennis tournaments I play in: “That was close. I called it out. But now that I see the mark — whoa — that might be in. But I already called it out — who’s going to know? And I could really use this point — if I get it that’ll give me the game and I could win the match. If I win the match I can tell my friends and they’ll congratulate me. That would be cool.” So the deed is done; maybe the next bad call is even easier.
And if that kind of thinking has ever entered your head, it’s easy to imagine your opponent could be doing the same thing to you. So when you hit a shot that is close to the line on the other side and your opponent calls it out, maybe you’re thinking, “I may not be cheating, but I’ll bet he is. I don’t want to be a sucker here. He must be a cheater!”
So I think that may be where we were in our tennis match earlier this week – as we teetered on the verge of violence.
After the “cheater” accusation, I stepped in to try to de-escalate. “Hey,” I told our opponent. “I’ve been playing with this guy for ten years and I’ve never seen him make a bad call. If he says it was out, it was out.”
And that, strangely, was the end of it. Our opponent’s partner said something to calm him down. And he did. We played on. Nobody got punched out.
But I also talked to the guy who accused us of cheating again yesterday. He remains convinced he was cheated on that point. Maybe because he really thought his ball was in. Maybe because it’s embarrassing to admit he might have been wrong. Maybe because he’s seen all those other stories about all those other cheaters in all those other sports. Once the notion of cheating gets normalized in a culture, it’s hard to root it out.
Notes:
History of sports cheating: https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2023/12/12/cheating-scandals-that-rocked-sports/70570326007/
Summary of recent sports cheating: https://www.bu.edu/cas/the-big-question-cheating/
Fishing cheating scandals: https://www.fieldandstream.com/fishing/most-outrageous-tournament-cheating-scandals-ever
Reported marital infidelity rates: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1367073/us-reported-to-infidelity/
1928 study of children and cheating: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2009-22097-000
2020 study of college student cheating: https://academicintegrity.org/resources/facts-and-statistics
COVID, AI and college cheating: https://www.brandeis.edu/writing-program/write-now/2020-2021/arie-rotem/index.html#:~:text=A%20lot%20of%20universities%20around,learning%20(Baskin%2C%202020)
Claudine Gay plagiarism allegations: https://apnews.com/article/harvard-president-plagiarism-claudine-gay-14330935453134c7c9c9a9c496020568
Allegations of Ariely cheating: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie and here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christianmiller/2021/08/30/an-influential-study-of-dishonesty-was-dishonest/