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."

Comments

Re:let me correct that for you.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

That is not the point. The point is that 1) communism, in its design, has nothing to do with what was happening in East Germany, and 2) even if it had, in the end stage, it wouldn't matter if communist-bred people cheated for money more than others because the communist society would be a post-scarcity one, so this is an artificial "problem" since there would be nothing to cheat for.