An ingenious study by Zoe Chance of Yale
University watched what
happens when people cheat on tests.
.
Chance and colleagues ran experiments which
involved asking students to answer IQ and
general knowledge questions. Half the
participants were given a copy of the test paper
which had – apparently in error – been printed
with the answers listed at the bottom. This meant
they had to resist the temptation to check or
improve their answers against the real answers as
they went along.
.
As you'd expect, some of these participants
couldn’t help but cheat. Collectively, the group
that had access to the answers performed better
on the tests than participants who didn't – even
though both groups of participants were selected
at random from students at the same university,
so were, on average, of similar ability. (We can't
know for sure who was cheating – probably some
of the people who had answers would have got
high scores even without the answers – but it
means that the average performance in the
group was partly down to individual smarts, and
partly down to having the answers at hand.)
.
The crucial question for Chance's research was
this: did people in the “cheater” group know that
they'd been relying on the answers? Or did they
attribute their success in the tests solely to their
own intelligence?
The way the researchers tested this was to ask
the students to predict how well they'd do on a
follow-up test. They were allowed to quickly
glance over the second test sheet so that they
could see that it involved the same kind of
questions – and, importantly, that no answers
had been mistakenly been printed at the bottom
this time.
The researchers reasoned that if the
students who had cheated realised that cheating
wasn’t an option the second time around, they
should predict they wouldn't do as well on this
second test.
Not so. Self-deception won the day. The people
who'd had access to the answers predicted, on
average, that they'd get higher scores on the
follow-up – equivalent to giving them something
like a 10-point IQ boost. When tested, of course,
they scored far lower.
.
The researchers ran another experiment to check
that the effect was really due to the cheaters’
inflated belief in their own abilities. In this
experiment, students were offered a cash reward
for accurately predicting their scores on the
second test. Sure enough, those who had been
given the opportunity to cheat overestimated
their ability and lost out – earning 20% less than
the other students.
.
The implication is that people in Chance's
experiment – people very much like you and me –
had tricked themselves into believing they
were smarter than they were. There may be
benefits from doing this ( confidence) .
However circumstances change and you need to
accurately predict how well you'll do, it can cost
to believe you're better than you are.
That self-deception has its costs and some
interesting implications. Morally, most of us would
say that self-deception is wrong. But aside from
whether self-deception is undesirable, we should
expect it to be present in all of us to some degree
(because of the benefits), but to be limited as well
(because of the costs).
Self-deception isn't something that is always
better in larger doses – there must be an amount
of it for which the benefits outweigh the costs,
most of the time. We're probably all self-deceiving
to some degree. The irony being, because it is
self-deception, we can't know how often.
Source : www.bbc.com/future/story/20150225-unexpected-downside-for-cheaters

The same thing happens when people cheat in relationships: they over estimate their worth and value.

I always believe that we are often set up in one success story that make us cocky and confidence. Trouble starts when we are to move to the next success rung and that ugly self deception of 'I trust myself' steps in to becloud logical reasoning needed at the crossroad and, oh! What a crash.