Socialists Are Cheaters Says New Study

“The longer individuals were exposed to
socialism, the more likely they were to cheat on our task,”

according to a new study, “The (True) Legacy of Two Really
Existing Economic Systems,” from Duke University and the University
of Munich. The team of researchers concluded this after working
with 259 participants from Berlin who grew up on opposite sides of
the infamous wall.

When playing a dice game that could earn them €6 ($8), subjects
originally from the East, which was for four decades under
socialist rule, were more likely than their market economy
counterparts in West to lie about how they fared. The
Economist
explains the task:

The game was simple enough. Each participant was asked to throw
a die 40 times and record each roll on a piece of paper. A higher
overall tally earned a bigger payoff. Before each roll, players had
to commit themselves to write down the number that was on either
the top or the bottom side of the die. However, they did not have
to tell anyone which side they had chosen, which made it easy to
cheat by rolling the die first and then pretending that they had
selected the side with the highest number. If they picked the top
and then rolled a two, for example, they would have an incentive to
claim—falsely—that they had chosen the bottom, which would be a
five.

The results were that “East Germans cheated twice as much as
West Germans overall,” leaving the researchers to conclude the “the
political regime of socialism has a lasting impact on citizens’
basic morality.”

The paper discusses some potentially related reasons for the
outcome, such as the fact that

socialist systems have been characterized by extensive scarcity,
which ultimately led to the collapse of the German Democratic
Republic (GDR) in East Germany. In many instances, socialism
pressured or forced people to work around official laws. For
instance, in East Germany stealing a load of building materials in
order to trade it for a television set might have been the only way
for a driver of gravel loads to connect to the outside world.
Moreover, socialist systems have been characterized by a high
degree of infiltration by the intelligence apparatus.

The Duke-Munich team positions their work against
a 2013 study, “Of Morals, Markets and Mice,” which concluded “that
market economies decay morals” but “compared decisions in bilateral
and multilateral market settings to individual decisions rather
than an alternative economic allocation mechanism.” The new
research finds that “political and economic regimes such as
socialism might have an even more detrimental effect on
individuals’ behavior.”

In another aspect of the study, the researchers note that “we
did not observe an overall difference between East and West Germans
in pro-social behavior,” such as donating to hospitals, the
capitalist-influenced demographic does, in fact, donate marginally
more.