Summary
An honest report can still bring rewards from someone else’s cheating. A repeated dice task explores that arrangement, its potential to spread dishonesty, and the benefits and costs of changing partners.
At a glance
Moral free riding means keeping your own reports truthful while benefiting from a partner’s dishonesty. In the repeated dice task described here, most honest players retained or sought dishonest partners, and exposure to dishonest partners increased later misreporting to some extent. Forced partner changes every three rounds helped curb that spread in this task, though rotation also involves losing an established working rhythm.
Ask whether you would plagiarize an assignment, and your first answer would probably be no. But imagine a difficult group assignment. Your resourceful partner has somehow obtained the official answers and has already used them to finish their share. Now they send you a copy.
Would you firmly refuse and ask for a more honest partner? Or would you quietly accept, then find yourself checking your own work against the answers and correcting mistakes before submitting it? You might like to think you would reject the offer. Resisting it could be another matter—and before long, you might be joining in.
Cooperation is familiar territory, from school assignments to starting a business together. A successful partnership can achieve more than the sum of its individual efforts, which is why people so often work together toward shared goals. But cooperation does not always make things better, especially morally. Once people understand the rules, they may join forces to exploit loopholes, maximize their gains, and ultimately harm social welfare.
We may feel confident that we will stay honest. We have far less control over whether our partners will. So what happens when an honest person teams up with someone dishonest? Social psychologists explored that question through a simple task.
Staying honest while someone else cheats
Imagine sitting at a computer and seeing the outcome of a die roll. You report the number to your partner. Your partner then sees another die roll on a separate computer and reports that result.
If your reports match, you each receive as many yuan as the number reported. If you both report three, for example, you each earn three yuan. If your reports differ, neither of you earns anything.
No one outside the pair knows the actual outcomes shown on your computers. You can report truthfully, or you can misreport to earn more money. If you both report six, you each receive the maximum reward of six yuan.
The task continues for many rounds. You report your actual result every time, but gradually notice that your partner's report always matches yours. You begin to realize that your partner is misreporting to secure a reward. Now you have an opportunity to switch partners. Would you take it?
The researchers found that most honest players chose to keep working with a dishonest partner. They called this behavior moral free riding.
The distinction matters: these players were still making truthful reports themselves. They cared about their own honesty without insisting that their partner be equally honest. They were also looking out for their personal gains. A dishonest partner could offer the best of both worlds—an intact image of themselves as honest, plus the financial benefits of someone else's dishonesty.
Now consider the reverse. Your partner is also scrupulously honest. Your reports almost never match, so you receive almost no rewards. Given the chance to switch, would you leave?
Most honest players in this situation used the opportunity to leave their honest partner and look for a dishonest one. Moral free riding was not simply a matter of tolerating a profitable partner's cheating. It could also mean seeking out that arrangement when an honest partnership paid very little.
When a partner's dishonesty becomes your own
Keeping your own reports truthful is one thing. Continuing to do so as the rounds accumulate may be harder.
Suppose you have realized that your partner always reports whatever number you report. Can you keep resisting the temptation to report six, regardless of what actually appears on your screen?
Switch the reporting order, and the temptation remains. Your partner goes first and repeatedly reports six to maximize the reward. Can you keep reporting honestly instead of following their lead and reporting six too?
The researchers found that dishonesty could spread. Compared with participants whose partners were honest, those paired with dishonest partners were more likely to misreport later. Initially honest people did, to some extent, begin lying under their partners' influence. The longer the two remained partners, the stronger this contagious influence became.
That can leave a bleak impression: perhaps most people will eventually become dishonest. But the findings also suggest a possible way to interrupt the process.
What happens when partners rotate?
If dishonesty becomes more contagious as a partnership continues, periodically changing partners might help.
When players were required to remain with the same partner, the researchers reported a 38% increase in the probability of subsequently lying when the partner had previously lied. When players were instead required to change partners every three rounds, prior exposure to a lying partner was followed by an 8% decrease in the likelihood of lying later.
In this task, repeatedly requiring people to work with someone new helped curb the spread of dishonesty.
Rotation also increased the proportion of pairs in which both players were fully honest. With fixed partnerships, only 4.6% of pairs were fully honest. With periodic forced partner changes, the proportion rose to 9.9%—roughly double.
It also reduced the proportion of lies that produced the greatest payoff. In this task, both players reporting six meant the maximum reward for each: lying at its most profitable. With fixed partners, 38% of lies fell into this category. With periodic forced changes, that figure dropped to 9%.
Think of teachers periodically changing classroom seating, or organizations rotating people through different roles. Perhaps these, too, can serve as ways of making us work with different partners.
Still, changing partners has a cost. You leave behind someone with whom you have just developed a good working rhythm and start the process of adjusting to an unfamiliar person all over again.
So preventing dishonesty from spreading cannot be the only question. We may also need to ask how honesty itself could become contagious. Making honesty everyone's default choice may be the outcome we most want.
Familiarity, temptation, and limits
Honesty is a virtue. Perhaps looking for loopholes is human nature, too.
When people first meet, they tend to be a little reserved, eager to show their better side. As time passes and they become familiar with each other, well—perhaps more of their nature begins to show.
The appeal of moral free riding may extend beyond maximizing material gains. Doing something wrong together can also offer a sense of intimacy and shared pleasure.
Even so, honesty remains a virtue. However comfortable we become with a partner, we still need limits: things we will do, and things we will refuse to do.
Frequently asked questions
Does moral free riding mean lying yourself?
Not initially. In the task described, moral free riders reported truthfully themselves while benefiting from a partner’s dishonest reports. Beginning to lie under that partner’s influence was a further development.
What happened when partners changed every three rounds?
In this task, forced changes helped curb the spread of dishonesty. Fully honest pairs increased from 4.6% to 9.9%, while the proportion of lies producing the maximum payoff fell from 38% to 9%.
Do these findings establish that workplace rotation prevents dishonesty?
The article suggests a possible connection to organizational role rotation and classroom seating changes. It does not establish that those practices reproduce the experimental effects, and it acknowledges the cost of rebuilding a working rhythm with unfamiliar partners.
