Cheating is now prevalent in many spheres of life

I have been thinking a lot about cheating recently – not the extra-marital kind, that is, but rather the act of breaking or bending the rules to have an unfair advantage over others or to beat rivals.

Cheating is everywhere of late.

In Formula One motor racing, the Renault team admitted to instructing one of their drivers to crash so their other driver could be advantaged.

In another startling story, now dubbed Bloodgate, the director of rugby at  Harlequins club, in England, asked one of the team physiotherapists to buy blood capsules from a joke shop and give them to players so they could fake injuries.  A player was caught spurting phoney blood on the field. But cheating, certainly in sport, is not new.

Race fixing in horse racing is as old as the sport itself. Tonya Harding got her ice-skating rival, Nancy Kerrigan, clubbed on the leg just before the American championship in 1994. 

And who can forget cricketer Hansie Cronje’s match-fixing shenanigans? And I have not even started on doping scandals, financial fraudsters and vote riggers, not to mention where cheating is difficult to establish or is ‘normalised’. Soccer players fake injury sometimes dozens of times in a match. Acting skills are now essential to professional footballers.

Money now calls the shots, and getting ahead is increasingly competitive. This explains why a young driver would deliberately crash a car, risking his and other people’s lives, or a rugby player would gush ‘blood’ on request. Both knew their careers could be advanced if they cheated and, seemingly, the potential risk of being caught was dwarfed either by ambition or feeling they had no other way to advance themselves.

Some studies have found that 95% of students claim to have cheated at some point in their school career.  In researching this article, I discovered dozens of websites dedicated to help-ing you cheat at school, including handy videos to demonstrate cheating techniques.

In a 2001 article by Donald L McCabe and others, entitled ‘Cheating in Academic Institutions’, the authors showed that cheating had increased in the previous 30 years at universities. They argued that students’ perceptions of their peers’ behaviour was the most powerful influence when it came to cheating. If lots of people are cheating, it becomes acceptable. If peers are perceived as cheats, others feel at a disadvantage and tend to eventually end up cheating themselves.

In other words, a permissive environment encourages cheating, which most of us know. The stock response to this is that there should be zero tolerance for cheats. But there is another way.

If McCade and his fellow researchers are correct, it is not merely context that matters but your peers’ behaviour and attitude that profoundly influence a decision to cheat. In the North American college system, this led to an honour code where integrity is valued in the faculty and among students. Research shows the system has fairly high levels of success.

The honour system does not solve all problems, but the principle is interesting. Creating an environment where people obey the rules because they think it is the right thing to do, not simply because they fear being punished, shifts the focus of responsibility from enforcement of rules to taking personal responsibility to act with integrity. The more people act with integrity around you, the less likely you are to cheat.

All this is a bit of pie in the sky, but it does mean change starts with each of us. Spending time thinking about your own integrity, the holes in it, and how to plug them, seems to me to be a lot more productive than shouting self-righteously at the TV when it looks like another sportsperson or politician has bent the rules. 

Have you ever paid less tax than you should have? Have you ever massaged your CV to get a dream job? Have you ever inflated an insurance claim? Of course not.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 9 October 2009. as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.

You are either for him or against him

There is nothing worse than seeing your own country denigrated in the foreign press. Sadly, this is what the blinkered supporters of Jacob Zuma, the former Deputy President of South Africa fired for alleged corruption and on trial for rape, are doing. Stories of his supporters protesting outside the court have been splashed all over the foreign media. It has been shocking to see supporters burning pictures of the woman who accuses Zuma and carrying placards reading ‘Zuma is being raped’. Liesl Gerntholtz, executive director of Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, claims she even heard teenage girls outside the court saying: “We are waiting for Zuma to rape us too – we want to be Zuma’s women.” Given that some 50 000 rapes are reported each year in South Africa, this must leave outsiders, and I hope the majority in the country too, wonder- ing just what is going on.

Of course, people have a right to support whoever they want, especially someone they see as having a significant role in liberating their country. I do not take issue with this. However, what is startling is how unequivocal and ferocious this support is. It seems like his supporters, to twist George Bush’s famous mantra, are saying: “You are either for him or against him.” If you do not support him, you are a political enemy and will be subjected to abuse. The fact that their aggressive protests will deter future rape survivors from bringing charges before the court in a country where one in nine cases of rape are reported seems of little consequence to them. The protestors’ actions highlight that there is still something deeply wrong within parts of South African society. The old apartheid mindset, which taught that the world was literally a black-and-white place, either all good or all bad, is alive and well. Further, if Zuma’s supporters have such unwavering conviction of his innocence, something neither they nor I have a clue about, then why not let the law run its course? The response, I imagine, most would give is that the charges are a political conspiracy to oust him as the next president. Do they seriously believe the entire legal system will conspire to deliver the exact verdict his enemies want? Sounds like paranoia to me, which is the flip side of the ‘You are either with us or against us’ mentality. Of course, Zuma’s supporters are not alone in this didactic thinking. Remember how Hansie Cronje was one day a hero and the next the pariah against all Afrikaners for fixing cricket matches. The inability of African leaders to condemn Robert Mugabe’s recent actions because of his past accomplishments as a liberation leader is another case in point, not to mention the way many whites use someone like Mugabe to make blanket assumptions about the draconian tendencies of all black politicians.

The ability to treat a situation with any subtlety seems to have died somewhere in our violent past. Is it not possible that someone can support a person politically or value his or her past actions, but, equally, be concerned about his or her current behaviour? It is time to shake off the past and grow up as a democracy. It might have been functional during apartheid times to see all those on your side as heroes and beyond reproach or all your enemies as evil, but the real world is just not like that. Surely, one can respect what Zuma has done as a politician but, at the same time, deplore the way he has let his supporters run wild in recent weeks, especially considering he is a former chairperson of the Moral Regeneration Campaign. Likewise, if he is found guilty, it will not erase his earlier contribution to helping the new South Africa on its way but, equally, his past achievements should not deter the law from taking its course.

This article was published on Polity prior to the conclusion of the case. Jacob Zuma was found not guilty.

This article by Brandon Hamber was published on Polity and in the Engineering News on 14 April 2006 as part of the column "Look South". Copyright Brandon Hamber.