Experiment Shows People Exposed To East German Socialism Cheat More 619
An anonymous reader writes The Economist reports, "'UNDER capitalism', ran the old Soviet-era joke, 'man exploits man. Under communism it is just the opposite.' In fact new research suggests that the Soviet system inspired not just sarcasm but cheating too: in East Germany, at least, communism appears to have inculcated moral laxity. Lars Hornuf of the University of Munich and Dan Ariely, Ximena García-Rada and Heather Mann of Duke University ran an experiment last year to test Germans' willingness to lie for personal gain. Some 250 Berliners were randomly selected to take part in a game where they could win up to €6 ($8). ... The authors found that, on average, those who had East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany under capitalism. They also looked at how much time people had spent in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The longer the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers ... when it comes to ethics, a capitalist upbringing appears to trump a socialist one."
let me correct that for you. (Score:4, Insightful)
"socialism"
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there was no socialism in east-germany. there was none in east-europe. that was fascism with a tiny bit of communism-appearence thrown in. socialism is found in scandinavia, belgium, netherlands, france, and the former western-germany.
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Refusing to acknowledge the icky parts doesn't make them go away.
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Refusing to acknowledge the icky parts of American fascism doesn't make it go away.
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That's true.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:4, Insightful)
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There is nothing odd about it at all. When you have no defense you must attack.
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While not all Fascists were Nazis, all Nazis were Fascists. And, whenever your kind uses the term "fascists" to denounce someone, they never bother with the fine distinctions between Hitler, Mussolini and Franco — instead attributing the very worst features of all of them to whatever/whoever it is they are denouncing. Hence my question: Where are the gas chambers? And until you can present anything remotely similar, using
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Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:4, Funny)
" it wouldn't matter if communist-bred people cheated for money more than others because the communist society would be a post-scarcity one"
These are the kind of mad myths an underground of crazies believe in.
But it's good that you remind us periodically of your existence. People might otherwise think you were a fabrication intended to scare children or something. Well, the underground is present and alive.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:4, Insightful)
By 1800s standards, we are post-scarcity. There is ample food for everybody in the world, plenty of clothing, lots of housing. The things a person from the 1800s would be working hard to get are not scarce, although political and economic factors do interfere with feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.
Let's look at the US specifically. Poor people very often have color TVs and computers and/or gaming consoles, since those are cheap entertainment. Many of them have motor vehicles. These are things nobody had 150 years ago. Modern manufacturing has made stuff really cheap. (This includes stuff from way back, that is niche market now. You can get a very good sword for a few hundred dollars if you like, cheap if you have an actual use for it.)
Now, figure what's scarce in US society now. Imagine a society where all that is freely available, or at least cheap and easily available to everybody. I guarantee that the society will find new scarce things for everybody to covet.
We're never going to have a post-scarcity society. Never.
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The point he was making wasn't that communism would create a post scarcity society. It was that communism as designed is only possible in a post scarcity society.
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If that was his point he failed miserably at expressing it.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
From experience; I would be willing to bet that ANYONE living with scarcity threatening day to day living is willing to cheat, lie, con, finagle and it can get so bad that you steal, mug, burgle,injure and could possibly kill, dependent on circumstances.
No real research in this story, just a reminder of mans state.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
And, really, the same thing happens on Wall Street.
Capitalism leads to cheating and malfeasance just as well.
The difference is the rich feel entitled to it, and some people think it's the natural order of things.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Enron. Bernie Madoff. Asset Backed Paper Commodities. High Frequency Theft.
Meh. I read the paper as for this specific group of people, coming from a system which was pretty much flawed and unfair, people have decided that "fuck it, why play by the rules" is a perfectly good strategy.
I don't believe that socialism (or capitalism) inherently create more cheating.
I simply believe that once people believe the system is unfair, or the penalty of being a dick is sufficiently small, why bother playing by the rules?
Humans are greedy, self absorbed, and selfish. And any system which favors one set of people over another will lead to people deciding if the system isn't fair, why play by the rules?
Cheating the government is Ok (Score:3)
From my experience — growing up in the USSR — it was perfectly Ok and morally acceptable to cheat the government. Because the repressive beast cheated the citizens far worse — when it was not outright killing them.
Sadly, modern Western gov
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There was little scarcity actually threatening day to day living in East Germany. They were the most productive eastern bloc economy by far, maybe because they experimented with some market pricing and even permitted some private enterprise.
What there was, was really invasive spying and political censorship, and bad coffee.
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Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:4, Informative)
How about automating virtually all production, as is rapidly beginning to happen? If one man maintaining a ten robots can produce as much as a hundred men by hand then you're well on your way to achieving post-scarcity. And if you don't come up with some way for the other 99 men to earn a living you're going to have some serious social problems. Sure, freeing up all that labor force makes it possible to re-harness it in other ways - but if a robot can outperform a human in most production, service, and management rolls you're going to have a real challenge finding ways for the displaced workers to make a meaningful economic contribution to society. And perhaps more to the point, would you necessarily want to? At that point you've made it possible, even practical, to achieve the mythical land of milk and honey. Spread the remaining jobs across 4-10 times as many people and everyone on the planet has the option of living a life of leisure where no-one has to work more than a few hours a week to provide for everyone, freeing everyone to focus their energy on art, philosophy, family, or even just recreation.
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It is beginning to happen, you'd observe, in Capitalist countries. Socialism, which was, officially, the first step towards that post-scarcity nirvana of Communism, would never have been able to achieve it.
That same Capitalism, where everybody is not just allowed, but encouraged to do whatever other peo
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Employing a Marxist theory of capitalism to refute socialism? Fascinating.
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What scarcity? Energy is dirt cheap, and getting cheaper as advances in renewables drive the cost down to the point where it's becoming competitive with coal. To say nothing of the several promising fusion technologies currently being developed (and who knows, maybe something will come of ITER as well)
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Umm, since when do you imagine we began large scale elemental transmutation? Our molybdenum and cadmium production comes from ore, just like all our other mineral resources - refining it is energy intensive, but nothing remotely like the energy requirements for transmutation, even if we had the technology to do such a thing efficiently.
And why would we want to create gold? It's a largely useless material - rare, but so worthless that most of it is used for jewelery and similar silliness. Produce it in qu
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Funny)
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Scandinavia is not icky, nor is france or the netherlands. Not sure about belgium :-)
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Interesting)
East Germany was a form of totalitarian socialism, but the totalitarian aspect was far more prominent. The socialist part was very similar to the socialist part of West Germany and much of Western Europe at the time (welfare state, government calling itself socialist, state ownership of industry).
I'm guessing if you did the same study of people growing up in the capitalist totalitarian regimes (ie those military dictatorships backed by the US) you would see a similar story - its totalitarianism, the systematic undermining of trust in others by the Stasi/Secret police (are we seeing this now with the NSA/GCHQ/policing etc?)
If you looked at libertarian socialist societies them you'd likely find they are less likely to cheat thanks to a high degree of social trust.
Also, in a capitalist society, you'll find that the rich are more likely to cheat. That suggests to me that to get capitalism encourages cheating as a means to get ahead - hardly a ringing endorsement (and helping put to be the myth of meritocracy).
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If you looked at libertarian socialist societies them you'd likely find they are less likely to cheat thanks to a high degree of social trust. Also, in a capitalist society, you'll find that the rich are more likely to cheat.
[citation needed]
I'd more easily believe that the libertarians would cheat more, because they assume the rules don't prevent it, and that rich capitalists would actually cheat less, but they'd exploit every nuance of the rules to their advantage.
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That's not the impression I get of libertarians. I find many of their writings naive and overly trusting. My conclusion is that a whole lot of libertarians are honorable and trustworthy people that just don't get the fact that others aren't like them. I'd be real hesitant to vote for a libertarian, but I'd have no qualms about having business dealings with one. I'd expect them to hold up their end of the deal without giving me any problems with it.
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Not the GP. The CEO at my work gets $100+k a year, and he rips off government funding, rips off his employees (steals directly from our pay), and he's been known to steal software licences, pirate software and video. I'd bet that he uses the IT budget to buy his home computer equipment, too.
So there's your citation.
Wow, a solid citation. You do realize you're only hurting your argument by singling out a single person out of a world of 6B people as proof that rich people cheat. Don't make yourself look blatantly ignorant, back up your opinions man. Besides, I don't think most people would consider a CEO that makes money in the $100+K/year a CEO of much of anything. Many regular white collar jobs make more money than that. That's probably upper-middle class at best, which in fact works against your conclusions.
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Strictly speaking, Capitalism is when a group of people pool resources in the expectation of obtaining a return on investment. In one sense, Communism is Capitalism expanded to the point where the group of people involved is the entire population.
Capitalism and the Free Market are 2 different things. Capitalism functions well in a free market, but it doesn't depend on it except to the extent that non-free markets exclude players, whether capitalized or not. No-bid contracts, for example.
What annoys me about
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Exactly. The fact that the original article describes East Germany as socialist and West capitalist and then attempts to claim that as the reason subjects were more likely to cheat indicates an agenda....
Indeed there is. The Economist is a conservative periodical, although normally a sane one - and thus would be considered "left" by the former GOP of today. Here though, the temptation for a dishonest smear at "socialism" was just too tasty to pass up. By The Economist's normal standards West Germany was/is a socialist society, though like other successful western socialist societies it is also capitalist (the two aren't actually exclusive, but are commonly found together in mixed systems).
Check out the comm
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Their intent was to make the same argument that the soviet union did: that they weren't actually communist, "yet".
Well, by Marx's definition they weren't. The Soviet Union had, in theory, achieved the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is an intermediate system between capitalism and communism. In my opinion in was more dictatorship than proletariat, but that's not surprising given human nature. Centralization of power always leads to abuse.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
there was no socialism in east-germany. there was none in east-europe. that was fascism with a tiny bit of communism-appearence thrown in. socialism is found in scandinavia, belgium, netherlands, france, and the former western-germany.
Most Western European countries are mixed economies, mostly capitalist, with some socialism, and a welfare state.
East Germany and the Soviet Union really bought into the idea of Socialism: the state owned everything. Private property was outlawed. You could go to jail for making a profit.
The East Germans were so committed to the idea that the state owned everything that they believed they had a right to build an enormous wall to keep the governments property (people) from escaping to the West.
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communism != socialism. you're an American, aren't you ?
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Communism is State Socialism. It should be wrong to say that it is the only socialism out there, but it is definitely socialism.
I admit that I don't know why they said it was "socialism" vs. "capitalism". Granted, the West had capitalism involved, but there was definitely some form of socialism in Western Europe too.
Perhaps the real difference was an authoritarian vs. a democratic upbringing. In authoritarian states of all stripe, people might be inclined to try and fight or deal with the system the only way they could.... by cheating it.
To tell the truth, I think Communism itself was a flawed system, specifically because it set up the groundwork for revolutionary tyranny based on wishful thinking, followed by Leninism which set the groundwork for state tyranny enshrined in a Party that ruled a state that never quite got around to withering away. The fact that an authoritarian system developed from that is no surprise, but I don't know that such a state is the only possible result of the other forms of socialism.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Informative)
Communism is State Socialism. It should be wrong to say that it is the only socialism out there, but it is definitely socialism.
Nonsense. Read your Marx. Communism and Socialism don't even remotely resemble one another. The only reason people get them confused is that Communism, as defined by Marx, was the ideal human goal and has never actually existed.
What you describe as "State Socialism" is what most people just call Socialism... because socialism requires a strong State.
While some countries liked to CALL THEMSELVES communist, they were not. They were anything but. The best any of them ever managed to achieve were bad forms of socialism and fascism.
The reason for that is simple: socialism (the real economic theory of socialism) requires a strong central authority. Whereas communism (genuine communism, according to social and economic theory) has no "authority" at all.
The problem has been that once a relatively few people got all that authority, under a socialist or fascist regime, they then never wanted to give it up. So societies never "evolved" beyond that to true communism. Nor is it likely to ever happen. Marx was a loon.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem has been that once a relatively few people got all that authority, under a socialist or fascist regime, they then never wanted to give it up. So societies never "evolved" beyond that to true communism. Nor is it likely to ever happen. Marx was a loon.
Pure communism is an interesting idea that is unlikely to work with humans in the long run.
It does not follow that "Marx was a loon". Given a society or species that is much more altruistic, willing to contribute to the entire society rather than focusing on personal benefit, the result would be elevation of everybody.
The idea by itself has merit, where all of society is doing all it can to contribute to everyone. But humans are greedy, selfish, lying, power hungry, egoistic creatures. Good idea, just not for humanity.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Communism works incredibly well but only in very small groups where pooled resources are necessary for survival.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Communism is State Socialism. It should be wrong to say that it is the only socialism out there, but it is definitely socialism.
Soviet communism was (corrupted) state capitalism disguised as state socialism.
Russia was truly communist for a few years after the Russian revolution, until the Bolsheviks took over and turned everything on its head and forever corrupted the word "communism". Now, instead of thinking "oh, communal ownership of the means of production so all may be equal", most people think "oh, corrupted state owns everything and represses its people so that a select few can have it unimaginably better than others" - which is so far from (any of) the communistic ideals that it's almost impossible to go any further.
Soviet communism was communistic in name only.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm. A corrupted state where a handful of powerful elites dominate politics and the economy and use a captive government to repress the people so a select few can have it unimaginably better than others... where else have I seen that...
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Re: the idea of Socialism (Score:2)
the idea of Socialism: the state owned everything.
That's not the idea of Socialism. The idea of Socialism is that the *workers* own the *means of production*. The state, as so clearly demonstrated by the failed eastern European experiment, was neither identical with, nor even adequately represented the interests of, the workers; and 'everything' is a far greater scope than just 'the means of production'. In other words, the Soviet bloc countries were no more Socialists than the National Socialists were, w
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:4, Insightful)
That is not fully true. At least in East Germany you owned things. You could own a car and the furniture in your house. You may have hat to wait long to get them, but you bought them from the money you own. In cretin circumstances you could also own a house, but that was rather rare.
Nevertheless the the notion you point out is sort of correct. If you all get the same pay and there is an allocation system based on "need", it is clear that you try to game the system, like work less or "needing" more.
Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Funny)
In cretin circumstances you could also own a house
They should make an experiment to determine the likelihood of random Autocomplete errors making statements more insightful.
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Re:let me correct that for you. (Score:5, Informative)
While I understand what you mean, I prefer not to play with word definitions. For me, spoken language is a democratic process, and words mean what the majority of people believe them to mean. That's how language develops. It's called semantic shift. If the majority of people have the "wrong" definition, then it perhaps the word has simply shifted its meaning, and it's time to acknowledge that.
That said, what is the colloquial meaning of socialism? How does the common man on the street define it? I'm from Eastern Europe, and here for example, anyone you ask will tell you that socialism mean the way things were in the Warsaw Pact - a one-party state, propaganda, jobs provided by the state, and all life organized by the state. Nobody here would call Norway socialist. In fact, most people here would simply call them a capitalist country, because to us, any country West of the Warsaw Pact, including Norway, was simply a capitalist country. Socialism meant Us, and capitalism meant Them, and Norway wasn't part of Us.
Of course, that's what socialism means in Eastern Europe, perhaps it has a slightly different meaning in America.
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Fascist as a slogan solved all the generational ww2 problems for the emerging East German. Every old person was tainted by it. The next East Germans could be seen as safer as they where shaped
Money (Score:5, Insightful)
How much money did the people in each group have, on average, during their youth?
Otherwise they might be just testing whether richer people give a lesser value to a small amount of money than poorer people.
I'm pretty sure the average 20yo european would cheat less to get 8$ than the average south american and more than the average japanese.
Re:Money (Score:5, Informative)
Otherwise they might be just testing whether richer people give a lesser value to a small amount of money than poorer people.
It's not money, it's access to goods (and pretty much everything else). If you wanted anything in East Germany (or Poland, Hungary, Romania, Russia, ...), you had to take shortcuts. My west German relatives used to visit their east German relatives with the car packed with luxury goods like tins of paint (for their roof), which were unavailable to most people in the east unless you knew how to game the system. All this study seems to be showing is that if you grow up in a society where you need to be able to game the system in order to get anywhere, you end up gaming the system in order to get somewhere.
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The problem was even if you put in the hard work, stayed loyal to the gov and its meetings, had the skills you might not be able to escape your parents pasts.
ie same skills, age, level of trust to a point but if your parents where pre ww2 wealthy you might not get anywhere out of the East.
ie if you got to work in the
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All this study seems to be showing is that if you grow up in a society where you need to be able to game the system in order to get anywhere, you end up gaming the system in order to get somewhere.
Absolutely right, and ultimately doesn't have much to do with socialism per se, although socialism, as implemented in Eastern Europe, certainly created a climate in which one had to game the system in order to survive. Take the example of Romania today (obviously no longer "socialist"), where the minimum wage is somewhere around 200 euros, and the median wages are not too far off from that figure. The prices there are basically the same as in East Germany, so most of the people need to game the system someh
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My Polish grandmother wouldn't go out to buy things, she'd go out to "take care" of them. Be it by trade, barter or straight out buying, it was all "taken care of".
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Exactly right. My thoughts exactly.
If one were to conduct the same study but offer $10,000 instead if $6, I am quite sure the percentage of cheaters would rise to include a significant number of those born in the relatively rich West.
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Someone who doesn't cheat for $6 might cheat for $10k, but someone who will cheat for $6 will almost certainly cheat for any larger value.
No.
Someone who will cheat for $6 can rationalize it by saying "everybody does this; it's only $6". In fact, the lower the amount, the less anyone would feel like they did something amoral. Which is exactly the opposite of what you implied.
The 'everybody does this' part is probably a huge factor in this research.
Trying to see thiis article for what it is. (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm just on my morning coffee. Isn't it a bit early in the morning for propaganda? (Or does anyone here think we would be reading this if that plane hadn't gone down?)
Breaking news (Score:5, Insightful)
My guess is this is more an effect caused by Stasi, and not the communism/capitalism divide.
Re:Breaking news (Score:5, Insightful)
.. there's a reason paranoia is a typical stereotype associated with eastern bloc societies. ...and the united states these days. Corporates cannot dominate without a powerful state willing to back them.
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The Versailles peace treaty, while harsh, was not as punitive as German nationalists painted it. The social crisis had passed well before the Nazis came to power. The Nazis, typically Goering, courted the industrialists to establish an economic power base.
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Yes and no. I was not suggesting causation. Merely putting it into historical context. You are not denying that Corporate/State partnership was a characteristic of the Nazi rise to, and hold on to, power are you? I ask because the historical truth of that fact is there to find for anyone who cares to do the research.
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Also, a corrupt leadership sets an example.
Re:Breaking news (Score:5, Insightful)
This is actually one of the most important points and can't be stated enough.
Look at what's happening in the West now. Bankers run amok, ripping off trillions and causing widespread economic damage. Instead of being punished for their crimes (which aren't even acknowledged by those in power), they are allowed to continue. Inflation, taxation, offshoring, dubious immigration policies, and (in the USA particularly) a corrupted healthcare system resulting in enormous costs has ruined the middle class. The poor are just as fucked as ever and the only government response to that is to build more prisons for the crimes that are the result of poverty.
How do the people react? Take a look around. More and more people are resorting to get-rich-quick schemes and outright scams. Frivolous litigation in attempt to score a big windfall so they'll never have to work again.
Nobody wants to put in a hard day's work any more because they're realized that it's a sucker's game. Like a parent, government must lead by example. And the example they are setting is a dire one.
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Communism causes Stasi. It can hardly co-exist with other political ideologies! It seeks to eradicate them and institute a one-party state. One can hardly do something like this when right-wingers are allowed free speech right alongside the good people. Thus, the state needs to defend itself - for everyone's own good, of course.
"You are dictatorial." My dear sirs, you are right, that is just what we are. All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforc
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Thus, the state needs to defend itself - for everyone's own good, of course.
That sounds like the standard excuse for building a surveillance state - completly independent of what the actual political system is calling itself. And we're currently seeing it in far too many "democratic" states.
Re:Breaking news (Score:5, Insightful)
Communism causes Stasi.
So does capitalism cause House Committee on Un-American Activities?
And what's the difference between the two anyway?
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People raised in a country were the government spies on its citizens, encourages selling people out, and kidnaps dissenters are more likely to lie for personal gain..
Wow. You're broadening the definition enough to make it intresting to have people from several other countries tested, too....
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Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
Researcher ask two groups, that they know to be different beforehand, a question, and then are surprised to get different answers? Really? If it had gone the other way around, they would have had simply reversed the explanation. And this study has so many potential confounds, like poverty, or even geological distribution, that it's hard to describe the level of ignorance of researchers that contribute this effect in their abstract to "exposure to socialism". Last week there was something about children from religious groups vs. children from non-religious groups, and the message that gets picked up is: religious children are more superstitious, and this week it is: socialism makes people dishonest, etc., while in reality no such conclusion can be drawn. Seriously? F* this kind of research.
Correlation is not causation (Score:5, Informative)
The study reveals nothing about the nature of the link between socialism and dishonesty. It might be a function of the relative poverty of East Germans, for example.
Although the historically observed relative poverty may indeed be causally linked to choice of an economic-political system, even that would not be sufficient to appropriately identify the economic-political system as the cause of the alleged differences in moral aptitudes.
Re:Correlation is not causation (Score:4, Insightful)
It doesn't matter what the study says - give it two days to pass through the blogosphere and some right-wing news sites, and you'll see this presented as the proof that all liberals are lying scum.
suspect results. (Score:2)
hate to say it, but correlation does not equal causation. didn't east Germany also have significantly lower economic prosperity and hence people grew up with the need to take every advantage they could get. Even then it is still just correlation but I would be willing to bet economic conditions have more to do with it than political system/philosophy.
It's democracy, stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sigh. We've known for a long time that in autocratic regimes of any type, levels of interpersonal trust are lowered. After all, your neighbor might be an informer, and the state itself is a liar and propagandist. Similarly, low levels of social trust correlate with all sorts of antisocial behavior, from cheating and intolerance to distrust of democracy itself. So all this experiment really proves is something we already know: living a long time under an oppressive regime generates distrust which legitimizes cheating and so forth. Capitalism and "socialism" have little to do with it.
It's BIAS, stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
But thanks for showing it.
Study was done on 259 Germans.
Out of which "90 subjects reported having an East German family background and 98 subjects having a West German family background."
Too small a sample size to be of any use? Indeed. [wikipedia.org]
They are way out in the "our numbers mean diddly-squat" territory, as their margins of error are 7.82% (WGFB) and 8.36% (EGFB).
http://www.raosoft.com/samples... [raosoft.com]
I.e. when they report 9% and 19% average cheating that's actually 9 +/- 7.82% and 19 +/- 8.36%.
It could just as well be that WGFB are cheating 16% of the time while EGFB are cheating only 11% of the time.
Oh damn! Now it means that "because democracy, stupid", levels of interpersonal trust are lowered in the west.
Also...
They all rolled the dice only 40 times. A fair dice should give an average mean of 3.5.
They report average mean for "East German family background" (90 people) to be 3.83.
For "West German family background" (98 people) they report an average mean of 3.68.
But when you sample those same Germans whether they CONSIDER THEMSELVES East, West or just Germans - simply Germans (141 people) have an average mean of 3.70 while East/West Germans (73 people) have an average of 3.83.
Note how, smaller the sample the more extreme the result gets? That's because the overall sample size is too small.
A couple of people misreporting the results could be throwing the whole thing off.
AND they have a really strange sample of "German family heritage" (37 people), whatever that should mean as East-West was set as a 0-1 choice, who are practically not cheating at all, giving the average of 3.57.
While "others" (i.e. immigrants) cheat the most. 3.85. And yes, they are the smallest sample of only 30 people.
On the other hand... the incentive to cheat was simply not there.
At best, rolling a 6 all the time (i.e. cheating 100%), they'd get 6 Euros in the end. A cup of coffee costs about 4.2 Euros. [ekathimerini.com]
So people were supposedly cheating in order to get between 0.07 and 0.35 Euros?
But there was plenty room for false positives as they used physical dice they ASSUMED were fair.
When IRL a dice shorter by 3% on one side gives 6% more results on that side.
And low quality, toy store bought, dice are even worse. [dicephysics.info]
Also, East-West bias can be noted in the stats measured and stats assumed.
No regression calculation was reported for West German family, while t-test values were always fixed (i.e. assumed) for East Germans and always calculated for West Germans.
And there's that thing of "East German family background" being marked with a 0 and "West German family background" being marked with a 1.
Someone seems to like West Germans better.
Dubious Sample Size (Score:2)
The Better Angels of Our Nature ... (Score:3)
The latest book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined sets out the mechanisms and the reasons why this is the case. If you want the short answer ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
Classic game theory ? (Score:2)
I don't think there is much to see here.
Soviet communism, and marxist communism in general, operate (wrongly) under assumptions of the economy being a zero-sum game, so it's not really a surprise it has an effect on the ethics of its 'players'. Quoting straight from the Dictionary of Revolutionary Marxism:
In a zero-sum game people tend
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:3)
Indeed capitalism does [ted.com], globally. Such a shame western countries have been abandoning its core principles of rule of law, individual property rights and laissez-faire, for cronyism, forever-debt and militarism.
Honesty... (Score:2)
Yes I can see what they mean, the only measure of honesty is frequency of thieving and cheating, not magnitude. Under communism everybody cheats all of the time but most people who do the bulk of the thieving are petty thieves whereas under capitalism you have an elite made up of corporate executives, elected representatives and bankers that has been given a license by society to handle most of the thieving and cheating. Capitalists steal less often but when theft happens they rob everybody else blind. Epip
Socialism or dictatorship? (Score:2)
Are they sure the cause was socialism and not the oppressive dictatorship they lived under? It's not like their socialist government was democratically elected, maybe that's influenced them more?
Wrong Control Variable? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not socialism, that's just corelated (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a simple case of living in system where you need to cheat (be creative, "organize", ...) to fulfill basic requirements.
That means that people who have lived through this deprivation, act funny to people in more normal econimies:
1.) So you need to sacks of cement. Typical response of a Western guy, "okay, let's go buy 2 sacks of cement, and what exact kind do we need?". Somebody tha has lived in the Eastern block might start plotting a "plan" to get his hands at two sacks of cement. That might involve all kinds of criminal or semi-criminal behaviour, be it stealing, defrauding, ... => one of the reason why many building efforts of the communist were not as well built as planned, quite a bit of material disappeared.
2.) Values and perceptions are also shifted. Happened to our family. Our car was stolen in a former eastern country. Very irritating experience, one has to organize how to get home, fill out a ton of irritating insurance forms, and one might wait a couple of weeks for a new car. Our local acquaintances took it as if the theft was "the end of the world" => cars at that time were viewed quite different there.
In my experience, it took at least a decade of "freedom" before the worst of there effects were gone (e.g. I need X => let's see what shops sell X), and multiple decades before it all faded kind of in the background.
Germany is a special case too, because it was a split country (so many things that are not commonly visible are more visible), plus Eastern Germany was one of the economic powerhouses of the Eastern block, so normal people could avoid the deprivation economy quite a bit longer/had to endure it way shorter.
But still, the point stays, if the only way to feed your kids is stealing, most people will start stealing. And if the situation where this is necessary keeps on going for decades, certain habits and values form that cannot be undone quickly.
Commence distortion. (Score:2)
Run this through some biased right-wing news sites or blogs. You know how it'll turn out. I give it two days before we start seeing "Scientists show liberals more prone to lying" or "Science shows a free market makes people honest." Give it a week and someone will find a way to tie it into 'judeo-christian values' too.
No surprises here (Score:2)
Quite True (Score:3, Insightful)
One thing is that the folk is quite cunning in a bad way.
We had a joke in socialism which was called 7 wonders of socialism. I apologize for a quick translation which is inaccurate and probably misses the pun, but:
*1. Everyone has a job.
*2. Although everyone has a job, no one does anything (works).
*3. Altough no one works, the production plan is fullfilled by 100 %.
*4. Although the plan is fullfilled by 100%, there is nothing (nothing done).
*5. Although there is nothing, everyone has everything.
*6. Although everyone has everything, everyone steals.
*7. Although everyone steals, nothing is missing.
We invented company tunelling, go figure.
But was it really unethical ? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the realm of ethics, three main schools are contesting : virtue ethics, deontology and consequentialism.
Virtue ethics say that being ethical is showing a certain number of virtues, and lacking a certain number of vices. Honesty is a virtue, dishonesty a vice.
Deontology ethics say that being ethical is following a certain number of rules (self-imposed or not), and usually deontology ethics contain rules against lying, too.
Consequentialism ethics say they being ethical is judging acts for the consequences it has on people. For consequentialist, lying (or stealing, or killing) aren't bad in thesmselves, but only because they have bad consequences (ie, they hurt people). For a consequentialist, stealing something that would be wasted. For example, after a natural disaster, a supermarket is wrecked and has no staff anymore, and food products are getting rotten, there is no harm done in taking them, so it's ethical to do so.
If you look at that setup, well, what harm is done by lying? Not much, so while virtue ethics and deontology would still prevent people from lying, consequentialism doesn't. Maybe the answer is just that people growing in DDR, less exposed to religion, are more consequentialist ? Which doesn't make them less ethical, none of the three system is clearly the "best", it's a highly contested topic (I tend to lean towards consequentialism myself, but don't completly reject the other two).
And on this, I'm definitely a consequentialist. Being a role-player, "lying about a die roll" has no strict ethical value to me: if I'm a player, it's unethical, but if I'm the DM, it's just part of the job ! ;) I never lied about die roll as a player, and would never do it, so you can consider me to be "very ethical"... but on the other hand, in a setup like that experiment (when the harm of lying is not clear at all) or as a DM, I don't have any issue with lying.
Grow up under Socialist system (Score:5, Informative)
In order to fully understand how any society works, one must grow up under that system. As a person who grew up in the old Soviet Union, I am intimately aware of how and why the people were being cheated. My father pretty much gave me an introduction to the old Soviet system, and explained how it works.
Story #1.
My father used to work two jobs, as a house painter. First job was for the state, and the second job (In Russian "Khaltura") for himself. We lived OK, and could make ends meet. One time on a weekend, when I was ten years old, my father took me to his second job. I was carrying a bucket of paint (it was very heavy), and my father was carrying three. On the way he told me how it works. A state on the first job gives five buckets of paint to work on the apartment. By doing some Soviet Innovation chemical Magic with water, paint, iron powder and gasoline it is possible to make five buckets of paint out of two buckets (which what my dad used to do), and three of the buckets he would take to the second job. I recall being in shock, and my dad told me that the state hardly pays any money for survival, and only the second job can. He also told me that everyone steals, and in the Soviet System everyone steals because EVERYONE IS THE OWNER. I did not like the explanation, and was quite upset. However the person who we pained the apartment of (a local surgeon), interjected into our conversation. He told me that he does the same thing, except he and his nurses take (steal) antibiotics and other drugs, borrow medical instruments and once a week go to remote villages that lacks doctors to operate on the patients. That's how they make 70% of their living. This incident really opened my eyes. Everyone was stealing. A state store personnel would divert the goods from the store onto the black market, thus making a profit. A car mechanic would reuse old brakes (again, Soviet innovation magic) instead of replacing onto new ones, selling the new breaks. And everyone was doing this, not because they are dishonest, but because they needed to survive. To illustrate some quirks of Soviet Survival, here is a story #2.
This happened when I was 11 years old. It was a middle of the night, and approximately 3 o'clock early morning. I suddenly saw a light coming from my parents' room, and heard my dad walking in his heavy shoes. Looking at my alarm clock, I could not understand what would my dad be doing so early.
I came out rubbing my eyes, seeing my dad fully dressed I asked, "Dad, where are you going?"
And he answered me, "I'm going to a milk store, son".
I told him that the milk store opens at 6 in the morning, why would he need to leave at three. To which he replied:
"Son, if I wait until that time to come to the store opening, there is going to be such a huge line of people, that by the time my time comes to get the milk -- there is going to be none there. So I have to go and stay there for three hours, waiting until the store opens."
After my dad left, I drank some tea, ate my breakfast and went after my dad to the milk store to stand with him.
Anecdote (Score:3)
One of the most fair, hard-working & awesome people I know was born & raised in East Germany. She was also one of the first people over the wall when it came down. I've worked with her for 19 years & I'm pretty sure she'd have an exception to this "study".
Ethic superiority (Score:3, Interesting)
"when it comes to ethics, a capitalist upbringing appears to trump a socialist one."
This has me infuriated.
I am a former East German and lived in a very pro-state family. That also meant, that my family was under heavy surveillance, because they carried some responsibility. (We did not know that back then and were stupid enough to believe, we weren't, because most of the family believed in the system). I say that to illustrate, that my family truly believed in the state.
That said... even though they believed in the state, you had to get creative to get, what you need - as other people mentioned in this thread.
The story i am thinking about, is the moment, when the wall came down. I saw in my family and the families of friends, how advertising was religiously believed. Today we laugh about the Nigerian Prince Spam-Mail or the "Congratulations, you are the 1000000th Visitor to our page" - but back then, many people believed the mail-order and sailsperson-versions of these scams. They had not been exposed to aggressive advertising - a form of cheating. You might see this as trivial... for years I saw my grandma fillling out every stupid order - she was bombarded by telemarketing and she was not a stupid woman. Suddenly, it was not the state anymore, who you had to be afraid of (if you did not agree) - it were your fellow human beings. From a citizen, you were transformed into a customer.
That said - i personally am SO GLAD to live in today's germany. And the greif was unbelieavable, when everything came to light, that happened in Eastern Germany. It broke many people in my family, who truly believed in the idea.
To assign capitalism ethical superiority based on this experiment and the assumption, that cheating on money is a valiable source to do that... is wrong and funnily capitalist ; )
Political (Score:3)
The proper conclusion is that SOME combination of rampant surveillance by the government, totalitarianism, socialism, and poverty in East Germany lead to a greater willingness to lie and cheat. They have not even attempted to control for the confounding factors sufficiently to pin it on socialism.
Honestly, were I to make a guess, I would rank socialism as the least likely among those conditions to be the actual cause of the measured difference. I would place the fact that the Stasi employed a full third of the population to tattle on the other two thirds near the top of the list. Why not lie to someone who is 33% likely to report you to the authorities if you tell the truth?
If they really want to draw a solid conclusion, they need to compare with other populations as well.
This has nothing to do with communism (Score:3)
I would wager you could do this exact same test with people from any long term economically down trodden people.
We are talking about people who needed to lie to survive for 3 generations.
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ah.. no true scotsman would...
Re:It's called the "Sovok" or old soviet mentality (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe our greatest strength in the West has been the relative lack of corruption. I know that claim is like nails on a chalkboard to the common malcontent millennial armed with dozens of mod points around here, trained from birth to rail at every iniquity, but they are naive; the level of corruption that had to exist to reconcile the delta between the state and reality in Soviet bloc nations is several times greater than anything that has existed in the West.
Whole sciences had to be practiced in secret while the practitioners professed absolute allegiance to anti-science dogma such as Lysenkoism. A completely corrupt labor `bonus' system evolved to compensate valuable (not to be confused with `honest') employees despite government policy; something we see emerging today in our own corrupt government workforce. Occasionally the corruption would grow large enough to bubble to the surface and become embarrassing news even in a place that had absolute control over the news; the `Ryazan Miracle' was a case of this. Chernobyl was a direct result of corruption that provided bonuses and awards to officials throughout the system.
When you have to commit a crime by shopping the `black' market just to put staples in the fridge you are engendering a mentality. Sovok, as you say. An indifference to the value of laws.
Between the `drug war,' our welfare state, piratic corporate governance and ever greater abuse of power by our government, we are rapidly catching up.
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DDR (disambiguation) (Score:3)
DDR stands for Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic), leading to the European version of Dance Dance Revolution being called Dancing Stage for the first few mixes, and some people called DDR machines "East German disco bars". It also stands for "double data rate SDRAM", leading to bad jokes like "My PlayStation has 700 megs of DDR" in the early 2000s or "My PC has 4 gigs of DDR" as StepMania became popular in the mid-2000s.
But do people from East Germany hug the bar more?