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Experiment Shows People Exposed To East German Socialism Cheat More
An anonymous reader writes The Economist reports, "'UNDER capitalism', ran the old Soviet-era joke, 'man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite.' In fact new research suggests that the Soviet system inspired not just sarcasm but cheating too: in East Germany, at least, communism appears to have inculcated moral laxity. Lars Hornuf of the University of Munich and Dan Ariely, Ximena García-Rada and Heather Mann of Duke University ran an experiment last year to test Germans' willingness to lie for personal gain. Some 250 Berliners were randomly selected to take part in a game where they could win up to €6 ($8). ... The authors found that, on average, those who had East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany under capitalism. They also looked at how much time people had spent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The longer the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers ... when it comes to ethics, a capitalist upbringing appears to trump a socialist one."
"socialism"
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
How much money did the people in each group have, on average, during their youth?
Otherwise they might be just testing whether richer people give a lesser value to a small amount of money than poorer people.
I'm pretty sure the average 20yo european would cheat less to get 8$ than the average south american and more than the average japanese.
People raised in a country were the government spies on its citizens, encourages selling people out, and kidnaps dissenters are more likely to lie for personal gain.
My guess is this is more an effect caused by Stasi, and not the communism/capitalism divide.
Researcher ask two groups, that they know to be different beforehand, a question, and then are surprised to get different answers? Really? If it had gone the other way around, they would have had simply reversed the explanation. And this study has so many potential confounds, like poverty, or even geological distribution, that it's hard to describe the level of ignorance of researchers that contribute this effect in their abstract to "exposure to socialism". Last week there was something about children from religious groups vs. children from non-religious groups, and the message that gets picked up is: religious children are more superstitious, and this week it is: socialism makes people dishonest, etc., while in reality no such conclusion can be drawn. Seriously? F* this kind of research.
Sigh. We've known for a long time that in autocratic regimes of any type, levels of interpersonal trust are lowered. After all, your neighbor might be an informer, and the state itself is a liar and propagandist. Similarly, low levels of social trust correlate with all sorts of antisocial behavior, from cheating and intolerance to distrust of democracy itself. So all this experiment really proves is something we already know: living a long time under an oppressive regime generates distrust which legitimizes cheating and so forth. Capitalism and "socialism" have little to do with it.
Make cheese not war 8:)
It doesn't matter what the study says - give it two days to pass through the blogosphere and some right-wing news sites, and you'll see this presented as the proof that all liberals are lying scum.
I wonder if socialism was the wrong control variable to use in this study. I have a hunch that any people who were brought up in a society with extremely limited resources would be more prone to cheat to get ahead than where resources where more bountiful. I am a citizen of a third world country myself (India) and I find that among my compatriots, a few specific states that are highly underdeveloped seem to have higher crime rates on an average than those states that are relatively better off. What's more, emigrants from these states seem to suffer disproportionately high rates of incarceration even in other states. If you look at it in terms of poverty, the fact that people who have endured grinding poverty are more inclined to jostle to get ahead is hardly surprising.
It's a simple case of living in system where you need to cheat (be creative, "organize", ...) to fulfill basic requirements.
That means that people who have lived through this deprivation, act funny to people in more normal econimies:
1.) So you need to sacks of cement. Typical response of a Western guy, "okay, let's go buy 2 sacks of cement, and what exact kind do we need?". Somebody tha has lived in the Eastern block might start plotting a "plan" to get his hands at two sacks of cement. That might involve all kinds of criminal or semi-criminal behaviour, be it stealing, defrauding, ... => one of the reason why many building efforts of the communist were not as well built as planned, quite a bit of material disappeared.
2.) Values and perceptions are also shifted. Happened to our family. Our car was stolen in a former eastern country. Very irritating experience, one has to organize how to get home, fill out a ton of irritating insurance forms, and one might wait a couple of weeks for a new car. Our local acquaintances took it as if the theft was "the end of the world" => cars at that time were viewed quite different there.
In my experience, it took at least a decade of "freedom" before the worst of there effects were gone (e.g. I need X => let's see what shops sell X), and multiple decades before it all faded kind of in the background.
Germany is a special case too, because it was a split country (so many things that are not commonly visible are more visible), plus Eastern Germany was one of the economic powerhouses of the Eastern block, so normal people could avoid the deprivation economy quite a bit longer/had to endure it way shorter.
But still, the point stays, if the only way to feed your kids is stealing, most people will start stealing. And if the situation where this is necessary keeps on going for decades, certain habits and values form that cannot be undone quickly.
I believe our greatest strength in the West has been the relative lack of corruption. I know that claim is like nails on a chalkboard to the common malcontent millennial armed with dozens of mod points around here, trained from birth to rail at every iniquity, but they are naive; the level of corruption that had to exist to reconcile the delta between the state and reality in Soviet bloc nations is several times greater than anything that has existed in the West.
Whole sciences had to be practiced in secret while the practitioners professed absolute allegiance to anti-science dogma such as Lysenkoism. A completely corrupt labor `bonus' system evolved to compensate valuable (not to be confused with `honest') employees despite government policy; something we see emerging today in our own corrupt government workforce. Occasionally the corruption would grow large enough to bubble to the surface and become embarrassing news even in a place that had absolute control over the news; the `Ryazan Miracle' was a case of this. Chernobyl was a direct result of corruption that provided bonuses and awards to officials throughout the system.
When you have to commit a crime by shopping the `black' market just to put staples in the fridge you are engendering a mentality. Sovok, as you say. An indifference to the value of laws.
Between the `drug war,' our welfare state, piratic corporate governance and ever greater abuse of power by our government, we are rapidly catching up.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
One thing is that the folk is quite cunning in a bad way.
We had a joke in socialism which was called 7 wonders of socialism. I apologize for a quick translation which is inaccurate and probably misses the pun, but:
*1. Everyone has a job.
*2. Although everyone has a job, no one does anything (works).
*3. Altough no one works, the production plan is fullfilled by 100 %.
*4. Although the plan is fullfilled by 100%, there is nothing (nothing done).
*5. Although there is nothing, everyone has everything.
*6. Although everyone has everything, everyone steals.
*7. Although everyone steals, nothing is missing.
We invented company tunelling, go figure.
In the realm of ethics, three main schools are contesting : virtue ethics, deontology and consequentialism.
Virtue ethics say that being ethical is showing a certain number of virtues, and lacking a certain number of vices. Honesty is a virtue, dishonesty a vice.
Deontology ethics say that being ethical is following a certain number of rules (self-imposed or not), and usually deontology ethics contain rules against lying, too.
Consequentialism ethics say they being ethical is judging acts for the consequences it has on people. For consequentialist, lying (or stealing, or killing) aren't bad in thesmselves, but only because they have bad consequences (ie, they hurt people). For a consequentialist, stealing something that would be wasted. For example, after a natural disaster, a supermarket is wrecked and has no staff anymore, and food products are getting rotten, there is no harm done in taking them, so it's ethical to do so.
If you look at that setup, well, what harm is done by lying? Not much, so while virtue ethics and deontology would still prevent people from lying, consequentialism doesn't. Maybe the answer is just that people growing in DDR, less exposed to religion, are more consequentialist ? Which doesn't make them less ethical, none of the three system is clearly the "best", it's a highly contested topic (I tend to lean towards consequentialism myself, but don't completly reject the other two).
And on this, I'm definitely a consequentialist. Being a role-player, "lying about a die roll" has no strict ethical value to me: if I'm a player, it's unethical, but if I'm the DM, it's just part of the job ! ;) I never lied about die roll as a player, and would never do it, so you can consider me to be "very ethical"... but on the other hand, in a setup like that experiment (when the harm of lying is not clear at all) or as a DM, I don't have any issue with lying.
But thanks for showing it.
Study was done on 259 Germans.
Out of which "90 subjects reported having an East German family background and 98 subjects having a West German family background."
Too small a sample size to be of any use? Indeed.
They are way out in the "our numbers mean diddly-squat" territory, as their margins of error are 7.82% (WGFB) and 8.36% (EGFB).
http://www.raosoft.com/samples...
I.e. when they report 9% and 19% average cheating that's actually 9 +/- 7.82% and 19 +/- 8.36%.
It could just as well be that WGFB are cheating 16% of the time while EGFB are cheating only 11% of the time.
Oh damn! Now it means that "because democracy, stupid", levels of interpersonal trust are lowered in the west.
Also...
They all rolled the dice only 40 times. A fair dice should give an average mean of 3.5.
They report average mean for "East German family background" (90 people) to be 3.83.
For "West German family background" (98 people) they report an average mean of 3.68.
But when you sample those same Germans whether they CONSIDER THEMSELVES East, West or just Germans - simply Germans (141 people) have an average mean of 3.70 while East/West Germans (73 people) have an average of 3.83.
Note how, smaller the sample the more extreme the result gets? That's because the overall sample size is too small.
A couple of people misreporting the results could be throwing the whole thing off.
AND they have a really strange sample of "German family heritage" (37 people), whatever that should mean as East-West was set as a 0-1 choice, who are practically not cheating at all, giving the average of 3.57.
While "others" (i.e. immigrants) cheat the most. 3.85. And yes, they are the smallest sample of only 30 people.
On the other hand... the incentive to cheat was simply not there.
At best, rolling a 6 all the time (i.e. cheating 100%), they'd get 6 Euros in the end. A cup of coffee costs about 4.2 Euros.
So people were supposedly cheating in order to get between 0.07 and 0.35 Euros?
But there was plenty room for false positives as they used physical dice they ASSUMED were fair.
When IRL a dice shorter by 3% on one side gives 6% more results on that side.
And low quality, toy store bought, dice are even worse.
Also, East-West bias can be noted in the stats measured and stats assumed.
No regression calculation was reported for West German family, while t-test values were always fixed (i.e. assumed) for East Germans and always calculated for West Germans.
And there's that thing of "East German family background" being marked with a 0 and "West German family background" being marked with a 1.
Someone seems to like West Germans better.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens