In a trivia-test experiment, people were more likely to break the rules by peeking at the answers if they had been misled to believe that the test was easy, says a team led by Celia Moore of London Business School.

Those who had expected the task to be easy provided about 7pc more correct answers than those who had expected it to be hard, and the researchers determined that the gap was due to higher levels of cheating. The unethical behaviour appears to have been triggered by the participants’ attempts to reconcile a disconnect between their expected and actual performance.

(Source: Harvard Business School Working Paper)

Published in Dawn, Economic & Business, September 29th, 2014