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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.
I'm not superstitious, but I'm a little stitious. I've become more and more of a believer in some kind of fate/serendipitous force that ought to be respected, if I can't place it rationally that doesn't mean it isn't functionally useful to respect it in concept.
But, leaving aside the infidelity scandals, consider another much larger cheating scandal in the COVID era: academic cheating. West Point scandal, NPR, Academic study.
Why did students become more dishonest during Covid? Because a lot more opportunities appeared in a social world denuded of human contact and ordinary regulation. It's tough to feel guilty for "cheating" others when those others are just images on your screen. And while schools have done their best, it is near impossible to prevent cheating in a take home test. To be honest, I blame professors using old closed-book test methods for classes learned and tested entirely at distance for cheating scandals: you just can't ask people to be closed book in their own homes, it's stupid. Trust, but verify; and if you can't verify, don't trust at all. All of the mechanisms that lead people to choose not to cheat, the mechanisms that prevent them from cheating, the mechanisms that would catch them after they cheat, and the will to punish cheaters after they cheat have been weakened or eliminated. I won't feel bad for getting a "fake A" if nobody "real" knows I got an A anyway, it's just a resume line. They can't stop me, they can't catch me. And when they do catch me, odds are the Deans (see earlier argument about colleges getting soft) who would normally come down on me like a ton of bricks will make excuses for me because they don't want the scandal of failing a bunch of freshmen during these "traumatic times."
So if I were trying to draw a broad societal "Why" for why we're seeing so many minor sports/games face cheating scandals right now, it would be looking for common elements there. Maybe the sense of honor in these games degraded as a result of less time spent in person, together, with other players. Maybe procedures put in place to align with dumbass lockdown rules during Covid made it easier to cheat. Maybe competition stakes changed in such a way to attract cheating in greater volume, with cash opportunities as influencers making cheating in say Chess more lucrative than it once was. Especially at lower, qualifying levels, where Covid restrictions were probably stricter making oversight laxer; and where once being a low ranked (but ranked!) chess player meant nothing, now you can get a social media following and monetize it.
Our institution did this -- when everyone closed up shop in March 2020 we flat-out refused to administer any final exams for the spring since we knew we'd be doing them online and we knew we wouldn't be able to trust the data. Granted, I work for a military academy and we have some flexibility there that most institutions probably don't.
I don't think schools did their best, though. My view on the ground with lots of friends across lots of institutions is that teachers / professors were struggling to carry out their class in a difficult environment with little to no support from administration. If you have to pivot online, there are ways to take some advantage of that media, and lots of ways to do it catastrophically poorly. I haven't see any evidence that administration made any effort to help their professors transition smoothly and teach a good class as opposed to just throwing them to the wolves.
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