from The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead

David Callahan

David Callahan (b. 1965) is a cofounder of the liberal-leaning think tank Demos and the author of several books about economic and social policy issues, including Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America (2010). In The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead (2004), Callahan explores the various ways that he says Americans regularly cheat: in sports, on taxes, at work, and in school. This excerpt is from near the beginning of his book, in which he examines the rationalizations people use for their cheating.

KEY CONTEXT At the beginning of this excerpt, Callahan refers to what he calls “the Winning Class,” which he describes as those people in society who are successful economically, but who utilize unethical means to get there. Later in the excerpt Callahan refers to the “social contract,” which is a political theory that people in a society willingly submit some of their individual freedoms to a government they perceive as legitimate in return for basic protections and services. One example of a social contract is that when people pay taxes, they have a reasonable expectation that public schools will provide education for their children.

For those who are part of the Winning Class, or trying to be, there are plenty of reasons to cheat. The rewards are bigger and the rules are toothless. Yet many Americans with more modest ambitions and more humble means are also cheating.

Take the mild-mannered bookkeeper as an example. He is, by all appearances, an honorable man. He neither drinks nor smokes, and is quiet and dependable in the way of many bookkeepers. He rarely misses a day of work or tarries on his lunch break. When United Way comes around, he always contributes. He and his wife lead an orderly life with their two polite children and spend Sunday mornings at church.

The bookkeeper works hard during the early years of his job and finally gets up the gumption to ask for a raise of $100 a month. He is crushed when the request is denied. But the bookkeeper seems to get over his disappointment and soldiers on. He still arrives punctually every day. He never calls in sick when, in truth, he is well.

After twenty years, the bookkeeper finally retires. The company throws a small farewell party for him and gives him a watch. He and his wife pack up for Florida to start their golden years. A new bookkeeper takes his place. Poring over the financial records, this new bookkeeper finds that something is wrong. Things aren’t adding up. He flags his concern to the company. No, no, he’s told, the old bookkeeper would never get into any fishy business. He was a rock of reliability, the soul of integrity.

5 And yet, when the new bookkeeper completes his investigation, the facts are incontrovertible. The old bookkeeper, it is clear, engaged in a systematic pattern of embezzlement. The pattern is oddly consistent. Year after year, the amount of money stolen is never greater and never smaller, nor is it particularly large. It is $100 a month.

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The thieving bookkeeper exists in an apocryphal story passed down over many years among fraud examiners who probe workplace theft. The story is told to illustrate a point these investigators know all too well: that people are prone to invent their own morality when the rules don’t seem fair to them. This tendency explains a lot of cheating in America today.

There are roughly four reasons why people obey rules. First, we may toe the line because the risks of breaking the rules outweigh the benefits. Second, we might be sensitive to social norms, or peer pressure — we follow the rules because we don’t want to be treated as a pariah. Third, we may obey rules because they agree with our personal morality. And fourth, we may obey rules because they have legitimacy in our eyes — because we feel that the authority making and enforcing the laws is just and ultimately working in our long-term interests.

When people don’t obey the rules, you’ll often find several things going on at once. The Winning Class cheats so much because there’s more to be gained nowadays and there are fewer penalties, either legally or socially. Students often cheat for the same reasons: the stakes of academic competition are higher and the normalization of cheating means that there’s little peer pressure to be honest.

Motives like these are not hard to understand. Cases like the bookkeeper are more complex. A simple risk/benefit analysis doesn’t explain everything, since the bookkeeper was running a serious risk for only a modest sum of money and could easily have taken more. Nor do social norms offer much insight, since the bookkeeper’s thefts were not condoned by his peers. Instead, the bookkeeper operated by his own moral code to take from the company what he felt it owed him.

10 A lot of Americans have been inventing their own morality lately. Tens of millions of ordinary middle-class Americans routinely commit serious crimes ranging from tax evasion (a felony), to auto insurance fraud (also a felony), to cable television theft (yes, a felony as well in some states), to Internet piracy of music and software (more felonies). Most of these types of crimes are committed for small potatoes: to receive $700 more on a tax refund, to save $400 a year on an insurance premium, to get $40 a month worth of premium cable or an $18 CD for nothing. These crimes are being perpetrated by people who see themselves as law-abiding citizens, people who don’t imagine themselves above the law and who don’t have big-shot lawyers on call.

Day-to-day criminality among ordinary Americans is nothing new. “Unlawful behavior, far from being an abnormal social or psychological manifestation, is, in truth, a very common phenomenon,” commented the authors of a 1947 article about “law-abiding law-breakers.”¹ However, evidence indicates that this familiar problem has worsened in recent years — even as conventional street crime has fallen dramatically.

What is going on here?

Much of the answer, I suspect, lies in our broken social contract. An orderly democratic society depends on having a social contract in place that delineates people’s rights and responsibilities. It also depends on people having faith that the social contract applies fairly across the board. The social contract will break down when those who play by the rules feel mistreated, and those who break the rules get rewarded — which has been happening constantly in recent years.

John Q. Public need not to be versed in John Locke to feel that he has a legitimate cause for cynicism. He knows that white-collar criminals walk free, that fat-cat tax cheats get off the hook, that corporate money buys political favors, and that Ivy League schools are filled with kids whose rich parents greased the system to get them in. He also knows that when there’s a war, it’s working-class kids who fight it; when there’s a tax cut, he probably won’t get more than peanuts; and when there are layoffs, it’s those lower down the totem pole who’ll get the ax.

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15 Polls confirm that many Americans see “the system” as rigged against them. When asked who runs the country, many say corporations and special interests. When asked who benefits from the tax system, most say the rich. When asked who is underpaid in our society, most agree that lots of people are underpaid: nurses, policemen, schoolteachers, factory workers, restaurant workers, secretaries. And when people are asked whether it is possible to get ahead just by working hard and playing by the rules, many say that it is not.² [. . .]

The psychological fallout from people’s economic struggles has been significant. People worry intensely about their finances, especially the heavy debt burdens that they often carry.³ Many people are also less happy. “Happiness and satisfaction with life are, in many ways, the ultimate bottom line, a test of the good society,” observes scholar Michael Hout. Yet in the past quarter century, Hout’s work shows, gains in happiness have not been shared evenly in a U.S. society more divided by income: “the affluent are getting slightly happier and the poor are getting sadder; the affluent are increasingly satisfied with their financial and work situation while the poor are increasingly dissatisfied with theirs.”⁴

Such endemic unease might itself be a corrupting force in society. But economic struggle is all the more dangerous when mixed with high expectations of well-being — that is, the expectation that one that should be as happy as the shiny rich people on television and in magazines seem to be. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, the sociologist Robert Merton observed that Americans are taught that everyone can succeed if they work hard enough. America was “a society which places a high premium on economic affluence and social ascent for all its members.” But Merton also pointed out that there is no “corresponding emphasis upon the legitimate avenues on which to march toward this goal.” Americans worshipped financial success without being too concerned about how people got ahead. “The moral mandate to achieve success thus exerts pressures to succeed, by fair means if possible and by foul means if necessary.” These pressures were especially poisonous, Merton said, in a nation where not everyone actually could succeed — where there were limits on the economic opportunities that were available.⁵

Merton could have made these points yesterday. The pressures on Americans to make a lot of money are extremely high —higher, maybe, than they’ve ever been before. To be sure, there are many legitimate opportunities to do well financially. Yet ultimately the opportunities are finite. America needs only so many skilled and well-paid professionals. In an economy where structural conditions allow only the top fifth or so of earners to really get ahead, the other four fifths of Americans are stuck in the bind that Robert Merton identified: they live in a society with insanely high material expectations but with limited ways to meet these expectations.

What to do in this conundrum? Whatever you can get away with.

20 And how do ordinary, moral people justify doing wrong to do well? Often, they point to the unfairness around them — to the structures that keep them struggling while others thrive, to the ways that bad guys easily climb to the top, to the cheating that goes on by the rich and powerful every day. “People in subordinate positions make moral judgments about existing social arrangements and assert their prerogatives to personal entitlements and autonomy,” writes Elliot Turiel, a leading authority on moral development. Turiel is fascinated with why people break rules, and much of his analysis centers on what he dryly calls “asymmetrical reciprocity implicit in differential distribution of power and powers” — in other words, feelings of injustice. Turiel observes that “in daily life people engage in covert acts of subterfuge and subversion aimed at circumventing norms and practices judged unfair, oppressive, or too restrictive of personal choices.” These acts may place people on the wrong side of the law, or the established rules, Turiel says, but their true ethical implications are often a fuzzier question. “In my view, it would be inaccurate to attribute these types of acts of deception to failures of character or morality. Many who engage in these acts are people who generally consider themselves and are considered by others as responsible, trustworthy, upstanding members of our culture.”⁶

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It is easy to cheat like crazy and yet maintain respect for yourself in a society with pervasive corruption. It’s easy, for example, to justify cheating in a country like Brazil where oligarchical families have been abusing the little people for a couple of hundred years and are still doing it, or a country like Pakistan where government ministers and their pals in business live in luxury while millions rot in the slums of Karachi.

And more and more, similar rationalizations can work just fine in the United States.

The social theorist Max Weber was among the first scholars to explore how people’s views of “legitimacy” shape their respect for rules. He argued the commonsense point that people are more likely to follow rules or laws that seem fair and are made by an authority that deserves its power. There was nothing actually path-breaking about this point when Weber made it a century ago. Numerous big thinkers going back to Plato had made similar arguments, and support for this idea cut across fields — from political science to anthropology to sociology to education. Yet if the idea seemed like common sense, what Weber and other scholars typically lacked was the empirical “proof.” How can you really tell why people either obey the law or break it? How can you weigh legitimacy as a factor when there are so many other influences on people’s behavior? I may speed for many reasons: because I’m late or I’m a thrill seeker or I think it’s wrong for the federal government to impose speed limits and usurp local authority on this issue. Short of hearing me and lots of other speeders out and somehow verifying that we’re telling the truth about our motives, who can say why people like me drive so fast?

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Proof that views about legitimacy explain ethical decisions remains hard to come by. But the evidence has gotten a lot more compelling since Weber’s day. In his 1990 book, Why People Obey the Law, Tom Tyler picked up the legitimacy baton and ran with it into new empirical terrain. Tyler marshaled data going back thirty five years in arguing that most people are inclined to obey the law, but that this reflex can easily be undermined if the law is widely seen as lacking legitimacy. He looked at studies of juvenile delinquents in England, college students in Kentucky, middle-class workers in Germany, and poor black men in Newark, among others. He also conducted his own large surveys of Chicago residents. Tyler’s conclusion after all of this? Pretty much what Weber said a hundred years earlier.⁷

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25 Yet if the link between respecting authority and following the rules has found more support in general, this is still complex terrain. Much of the time when people break rules you’ll find a sticky wicket of conflicting evidence about their motives and no easy way to nail down what they were really thinking. Most people don’t like to talk openly about cutting corners. Also, the root causes of why people break rules can be obscured when cheating becomes so routine that people no longer give it much thought.⁸

The candor of Jennifer Bennett (not her real name) sheds some light on what is going on in many American households — and, in particular, how cynicism and anger might cause a person who normally wouldn’t even run a red light to commit a felony that is punishable by up to five years in prison.

Bennett should be one of the good guys in my story. She was raised in New Jersey by parents who taught her to play by the rules. She works in the arts in New York City but is obsessed with neither money nor status. She just wants to do her art and get by. She believes that government can make a difference in people’s lives and, if anything, that taxes should probably be higher than they are.

Yet every year, come April 15, she submits a work of fiction to the IRS.

“Much of the money I earn is off the books — it’s money earned in cash through private teaching or tutoring. I generally claim a portion of this money, but not all of it,” Bennett says. “It’s the money I earn to support my pursuit of a career in the arts. I put thousands of dollars a year into this career, pay my own insurance, and receive no benefits. I guess that’s the way I justify writing off as much as I can and claiming as little as I can. I feel that most other first-world countries support their artists and the arts in a much stronger way than we do, and that the wealthy in this country are the ones with the real benefits.”

30 Bennett has struggled financially for years, despite her Ivy League degree. Meeting the rent has often been an adventure, and she now lives 130 blocks north of Times Square, in a low-income neighborhood near the George Washington Bridge. “When I see people getting million-dollar bonuses for moving money around, who then walk in free to city museums because their companies are corporate sponsors, my jaw drops. Most artists I know can’t afford to attend arts events on a regular basis. I figure the amount of money I earn is so tiny compared to what most people in this city are earning, and that if I had to pay thousands of dollars in taxes at the end of the year, on the relatively small amount I earn, I couldn’t afford to continue doing what I’m doing.”

Bennett has anguished about her tax cheating — for, like, three seconds — over the past five years. “I don’t think it’s the ‘right’ thing to do, but personally, I don’t really care. I know that one wrong doesn’t right another wrong, but until I see any sign of a real move to universal health-care coverage or the closing of loopholes for the rich, or increased benefits for those making their living in the arts, I don’t feel particularly inclined to be honest. When I read about the IRS going after those in lower-income brackets, it makes my blood boil.”

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