Propensity to Cheat; Behavior, Physcology, and Hormones

[More Strides than Rides]

Some conversation for the coming off-season: In the Danielson thread, there is a tangent about social behavior and cheating. Other threads have broached the connection of doping and status, doping and social pressure, addiction, or the deteriorating ethics in a culture of doping.

Here's a thread to discuss all of that a little more generally, or a little more specific to basic human behavior or psychology.

Here's what I posted in the TD thread:

Here's that study I was talking about:

Globally, fraud has been rising sharply over the last decade, with current estimates placing financial losses at greater than $3.7 trillion annually. Unfortunately, fraud prevention has been stymied by lack of a clear and comprehensive understanding of its underlying causes and mechanisms. In this paper, we focus on an important but neglected topic-the biological antecedents and consequences of unethical conduct-using salivary collection of hormones (testosterone and cortisol). We hypothesized that preperformance cortisol levels would interact with preperformance levels of testosterone to regulate cheating behavior in 2 studies. Further, based on the previously untested cheating-as-stress-reduction hypothesis, we predicted a dose-response relationship between cheating and reductions in cortisol and negative affect. Taken together, this research marks the first foray into the possibility that endocrine-system activity plays an important role in the regulation of unethical behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record

(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Full text is behind a paywall: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/xge/144/5/891/, but the tweet I mentioned summarized:

steve magness ‏@stevemagness Jul 28

.@veloclinic those who cheated more on a test had higher T and C levels before and lower of both afterwards.

(T: Testosterone, C: Cortisol)

more from the twitter conversation:

@stevemagness @veloclinic reminds me of a part of this ted talk http://www.ted.com/talks/amy_cuddy_your_body_language_shapes_who_you_are?language=en … increased T equaled greater confidence, risk taking

The cheating-as-stress-reduction idea caught my eye. A way of framing the "decision" (to borrow from another thread) that I hadn't thought of before.

The fact that the abstact says that this is the first look at the relationship between hormones and unethical behavior means that we won't get a satisfying answer for a while.

I looked at the related articles and authors' other articles on pubmed, and read what I could:

The cheater's high: the unexpected affective benefits of unethical behavior.

The mismatch effect: when testosterone and status are at odds.

The social endocrinology of dominance: basal testosterone predicts cortisol changes and behavior following victory and defeat.

With regards to cycling/sports, there are as many reasons people dope as there are to do the sport in the first place. Some want the status, some want the personal achievement, some want health.

Taken as a whole, there is going to be a connection between hormones and behavior. Looking at the abstracts above (They're all only available by purchase), the individual studies may not be helpful. I saw one about testosterone in corporate executives discuss the positive relationship beteen T and dominance. Well, dominance and superiority are different mental states and different behaviors, but not accounted for by what the study measured. And in a different direction, the intrinsically motivated athlete can still feel the same hormonal effects of defeat as the extrinsically motivated one; as well as the ways those hormonal changes shift their propensity to dope to not loose out again.

Thoughts? There's more to doping than "prisoner's dilemma".

 

[doperhopper]

Great fun, cheating releases stress... that's why The Mighty Uniballer was so upset (e.g. SimeoniGate) - he didn't realize he was cheating.

 

[blackcat]

I think the title was incorrect.

The major flaw, is the definition of "doping", and "cheating". The peloton has managed to explain these away, and have justification for their orwellian norms and definition.

It is an insider v outsider dichotomy. The norms will be completely foreign to an outsider. ergo, us here. well, most of us.