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If you Google "cheating scandal" right now, Google can't figure out which story you want. There's like six different things you could be looking for.
Pro Poker Rocked By Alleged Cheating Scandal Where Winner Repaid $269K To Loser
Chess Investigation Finds That U.S. Grandmaster ‘Likely Cheated’ More Than 100 Times
Fishermen nearly won a tournament. Then weights were found in the fish.
Nia Long’s Fiance Ime Udoka Suspended From the Boston Celtics Amid Cheating Scandal
The Try Guys Release YouTube Video Laying Out Exact Timeline of Ned Fulmer Cheating Scandal
Adam Levine Returns to the Stage After Cheating Scandal With Support From Wife Behati Prinsloo
First of all, obviously these are two different kinds of cheating. The first three are people gaining unfair advantage in competitions and the latter are men having sex with women other than their wives. But I think it's defensible to discuss these together. After all, there's a reason we use the same word for both behaviors. Both are a major ethical breach where one person gains an unfair advantage at something by breaching an agreement.
(If we broaden the scope to "ethics-related controversy" we can throw in the recent chaos on Twitch over gambling and an alleged sexual assault coverup to this list.)
Is it schizophrenic to suggest that maybe it isn't a coincidence that this is happening at the same time? It kind of sounds insane, obviously it's a coincidence. But I don't know, sometimes it just feels like there's something "in the water" culturally and there are suddenly similar things happening in many places at once. An example of this is how sexual harassment/assault/etc. accusations tend to come in waves against many people all around the same time. Another example is just about everything that happened in June 2020. But in those cases I think the explanation is that a political movement that had been gaining steam for a long time is behind the phenomenon and the fact that the media is paying attention to it fuels more activism in a positive feedback loop. In this case there's no political movement and it's not clear how e.g. Magnus Carlsen withdrawing from a tournament over suspected would make it more likely for a fishing tournament organizer to decide to cut open some suspiciously heavy fish in the same sense that Harvey Weinstein getting canceled for rape makes more women share stories of sexual assault in Hollywood or one statue getting torn down leads to activists to try to tear more down.
Maybe this is actually normal, and there are always this many cheating scandals going on? If so, what were the ones from before? I heard of all of these stories, and I didn't hear about any from 2022 before September. Maybe this is a media phenomenon where cheating scandals are getting more attention now because there are no other major stories to take up the oxygen? If there were any cheating scandals coming out in, say, the month after Russia invaded Ukraine, or the beginning of the Covid pandemic, or the weeks before a presidential election, they probably wouldn't get much attention because there's just more important things to talk about. But none of that is happening now, so the media is free to focus on the Try Guys and it bubbles up to my awareness in a way it wouldn't otherwise. Maybe there's somehow a cultural energy towards exposing cheating, and for some reason people in many domains are turning their attention to it.
Or maybe I'm being crazy and it's a coincidence. I don't know. I'd be curious to read what other people think of all this.
To the extent these are reflective of any larger phenomenon it looks a lot what some commentators call the transition from a "high trust" society to a "low trust" one.
High trust meaning one where all members know and willingly follow "the rules" mainly out of some sense of social obligation rather than fear of punishment, where they honor their promises and cooperate at every opportunity.
vs. Low trust where members are constantly looking for a chance to defect for personal gain, and everyone KNOWS everyone else is looking to defect, and thus is on guard against that risk.
In high-trust societies you can sell vegetables with an honesty box for payment and expect most people will actually pay the right amount, despite there being effectively no chance of being caught if they don't.
Vs. A low trust society where stores put common household items behind glass due to how common shoplifting is. Just the other day I was buying a new phone and noticed all the displayed models were locked down so you couldn't interact with or examine them much. The salesman claims this was because too many people would snip the wire and steal the display phone. Frustrating.
High trust societies are theoretically better on the grounds that less effort and cost is expended on mechanisms for enforcing rules and thwarting defectors, and generally there is much less friction since you don't have to spend mental epicycles second-guessing your counterpart's motives.
In practice, no society runs fully on trust beyond a certain point, when the dollar amounts involved get high enough you can't expect a "handshake deal" to protect you, even with a friend.
Likewise, modern technology offers many options for enforcing rules that are cheap enough that you don't "need" trust in order to transact. Cryptocurrencies as a class attempt to solve this for currency and create the ability to engage in transactions with zero trust by either party. At least zero trust in each other.
But all-in-all, in a high trust society with iterated games, you would expect participants NOT to defect, cheat, or screw each other over in any scenario where they expected to have to deal each other on a repeated basis.
So we have some evidence here that formerly high-trust organizations that didn't implement fully robust anti-cheat mechanisms, relying on the good faith of their participants, are now having to grapple with the loss of trust and the now-apparent need to implement stricter enforcement mechanisms, to the detriment of all participants.
Is this actually a symptoms of a broader social trend where people are more prone to cheat than ever, or was this always occurring at similar rates its just now it is possible to detect and publicize these events more often?
I tend to suspect the latter but I've also observed many examples in my local community that make me concerned its the former, and we're in a slow, downward spiral where trusting societies are violated by repeated defections, which leads them to be less trusting, and inspires more people to act in ways that inspire less trust, since there is little/no gain for being honest when everyone else cheats.
I try very hard to locate and protect high-trust environments (for instance, my local gym sells water and protein shakes on the honor system) because I greatly prefer living in places where you can take other people at their word and don't have to constantly look over your shoulder. And the most distressing problem is that is usually only takes a bare handful of defectors to destroy said system for everyone.
So I would not be surprised if, on the margins, there are more people willing to cheat than even 20 years ago, and that leads us to a situation where trust has declined DESPITE most people still being fundamentally trustworthy.
I'm surprised to see Japan as lower trust, given that they send little kids on errands and trust slightly older kids to navigate around.
Maybe it depends on how the question of "Most people can be trusted" is translated into the language? In Japan maybe they hear the question "Most people (globally) can be trusted" and think of their geopolitical neighbors China, North Korea, and Russia and say, nah. And in China they hear the question "Most people (locally) can be trusted" and agree? "Share of people who trust others in their neighborhood" is at 74% in Japan at your link.
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