Like most of human behaviour, cheating is not a definite thing that most people do all the time. Unless, of course, if one is a crook. 
 
 Human behaviour depends a lot on the circumstances and the situation of the person in question and, according to new research, most people cheat at the last chance since they find it the most attractive. 
 
 Research carried out by London Business School (LBS) reveals that cheating is most attractive to people when their window of opportunity is about to close. This is based on an analysis of more than 25,000 cheating opportunities faced by more than 2,500 participants. 
 
 Whether it’s a contractor who seems to be fleecing money from you while doing your home, a household employee trying to make an extra bit, or anyone else, the time when you should be most on your guard against being cheated is the very last time. 
 
 Quite likely, those renovating your house will give you an over inflated last bill and your employee may do the damage if s/he is on their way out. 
 
 “We gave our participants different numbers of opportunities to cheat, undetected, for money. Our results showed that the odds of cheating were higher when people knew that it was their last chance to cheat, compared to when they thought they had more chances left,” says Daniel Effron, Assistant Professor of Organisational Behaviour, LBS. 
 
 “The data also suggest that people cheat at the end because they want to avoid feeling regret about passing up a final chance for personal gain,” he said. 
 
 In one study, Dr Effron and his co-authors hired 327 research assistants to perform several short work tasks over the Internet. The assistants were paid based on how long they claimed to have spent on each task. 
 
 To determine whether the assistants overbilled for their time, the researchers secretly measured how long each assistant actually spent on each task. The results showed that overbilling for a particular task increased by 42 per cent when it was the last one, compared to when some tasks remained. 
 
 “We already know that people will cheat on tasks like this, although not as much as much as they can get away with,” Dr Effron explains. 
 
 The last window to cheat influences the decision to cheat just as when money is involved. Money corrupts and people tend to cheat when they know they can make an extra amount. 
 
 A previous research, which was published in the journal Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes, revealed that people doubled the number of lies they told in order to earn extra cash if they were first prompted to think about money and perhaps this trait gets aggravated when it’s their last chance to profit. 
 
 This research evidence has important implications for organisations that want to reduce unethical behaviour but have limited resources for monitoring or auditing. These resources may be more effective if they are deployed at the end of a series of opportunities for dishonesty. 
 
 For example, invoices submitted just before a contract ends should perhaps be checked extra carefully, as contractors may be more likely to overbill on the last invoice. 
 
 (Image via Shutterstock) ||||| 70 Pages Posted: 31 Mar 2015 
 
 Date Written: March 31, 2015 
 
 Abstract 
 
 How do people behave when they face a finite series of opportunities to cheat with little or no risk of detection? In 4 experiments and a small meta-analysis, we analyzed over 25,000 cheating opportunities faced by over 2,500 people. The results suggested that the odds of cheating are almost three times higher at the end of a series than earlier. Participants could cheat in one of two ways: They could lie about the outcome of a private coin flip to get a payoff that they would otherwise not receive (Studies 1-3) or they could overbill for their work (Study 4). We manipulated the number of cheating opportunities they expected but held the actual number of opportunities constant. The data showed that the likelihood of cheating and the extent of dishonesty were both greater when people believed that they were facing a last choice. Mediation analyses suggested that anticipatory regret about passing up a chance to enrich oneself drove this cheat-at-the-end effect. We found no support for alternative explanations based on the possibility that multiple cheating opportunities depleted people’s self-control, eroded their moral standards, or made them feel that they had earned the right to cheat. The data also suggested that the cheat- at-the-end effect may be limited to relatively short series of cheating opportunities (i.e., n < 20). Our discussion addresses the psychological and behavioral dynamics of repeated ethical choices. ||||| Life, for better or worse, is full of endings. We finish school, get a new job, sell a home, break off a relationship. Knowing that a phase is soon coming to an end can elicit the best in us, as we try to make amends for errors past and avoid last-minute regrets. We might try to visit that local museum, or make time for happy hour drinks with a longtime coworker, or be more generous with our praise to a partner. 
 
 
 
 But while the sense of an ending can draw out people’s finest selves, it can also, new psychological research suggests, bring out their darker side. This study concludes that, as people get closer to finishing an activity, they become more and more likely to deliberately deceive others for their own benefit. And they do this, the research shows, because they anticipate regretting a missed opportunity to cheat the system. 
 
 To demonstrate this “cheat at the end” effect, the experimenters conducted an ingenious series of experiments. In the first one, they recruited a large number of people through the internet to participate in a coin-flipping experiment. The task was to flip a coin a handful of times and, each time, to simply guess which side it would land on. So hundreds of people at their home computers duly dug a quarter from their pockets and flipped. Each time, they marked whether they had guessed right or wrong. And each time they got it right, they won a small cash prize. 
 
 The experimenters told people explicitly not to cheat. But of course, since people were performing the study in private, there was no way to catch anyone red-handed. It was, on the other hand, possible to detect cheating in aggregate. If no one cheated, the percentage of correct guesses is expected to be around fifty. Minor deviations from this value are normal, but statistics tell us that anything greater than a few percentage points is evidence that people stacking the deck in their favor. 
 
 The results were surprising. In the early rounds, the percentage of right guesses reported deviated very little from fifty percent—suggesting few people distorted the results. (This is reassuring for those optimists out there, as it suggests 
 
 that people are often honest even when they don’t have to be.) 
 
 In addition, the number of times people tossed the coin did not have a strong effect on how much they cheated. Even by the fifth flip, the number of correct flips reported wasn’t much greater than chance. What did matter, by contrast, was how many tosses people thought they had left. The experimenters told some people they’d get seven tosses, others ten. The “seveners” were fairly honest up until the seventh flip—then they cheated like mad, with two thirds reporting a correct guess—sixteen percent higher than expected. By contrast, the “tenners” were honest up until the tenth flip—and only then did they start cheating. This suggests that what makes people want to cheat isn’t how many opportunities they’ve had in the past—it’s how many chances they’ve got left. 
 
 The experimenters wanted to see if this phenomenon held up in a more true-to-life situation. In this experiment, they “hired” several hundred people to help grade essays that had ostensibly been written as part of another study. Similar to the coin-flip study, people were told they would be reading either seven or ten essays. They were paid according to the amount of time they invested in each essay. After each essay, they were asked to report how much time they’d spent. 
 
 Unbeknownst to participants, their time was also being logged by a secret timer. So the experimenters could simply see how much their reported time differed from reality. The results confirmed the previous study: while the seveners cheated wildly by the time they reached their seventh essay, reporting spending at least 25% more time than they actually did, the tenners waited ‘til their final round to do the same. Once again, cheating happened most when people thought they were nearing the end of the line. 
 
 The implications of this research extend beyond the walls of the laboratory. Political terms, job tenures, school years, golf games—all happen over a finite period of time. We’d be wise to keep an extra-vigilant eye, therefore, on lame-duck senators, students in spring semester, and golf partners on the eighteenth hole. 
 
 Even further, it demonstrates another side of a natural ability to anticipate the future. A strange mood comes over us when we have the sense of an ending. We get a little friskier; we live with more abandon. (Jon Stewart, for instance, was arguably never perkier than in the last few months of filming the Daily Show.) This fact jibes with studies showing that that dopamine, a chemical in the brain associated with pleasure and risk-taking, ramps up in rats as they near the end of a maze. This sense of anticipation can help us eke the most out of transient moments, as we try to squeeze a little more from the toothpaste tube, even if it doesn’t belong to us.
– Want to catch a cheater? Wait until the last hand, the last semester, or the last week on the job. That's according to new research that shows people are most likely to be dishonest for personal gain the closer they are to the end of something, Scientific American reports. Three researchers gave more than 2,500 people more than 25,000 opportunities to cheat and found the odds of cheating were nearly three times higher "at the end of a series," the researchers write. According to Emirates 24/7, participants were most likely to cheat when they knew it was their last chance to do so. “The data also suggests that people cheat at the end because they want to avoid feeling regret about passing up a final chance for personal gain,” researcher Daniel Effron says. In one experiment, subjects who were recruited online were told to flip a coin and attempt to influence it, with their minds, to land on "heads." Every time a participant reported the coin landing on one side or the other (researchers switched it up), they were given a cash prize, and there was no way for researchers to verify they were telling the truth. In early flips, self-reported "winning flips" hovered around the expected 50%, but they shot up on the final flips. In a second experiment, people were hired to grade essays and were paid based on how long they claimed they spent on each. A secret timer found participants were most likely to lie about how long it took them to grade the final essay. The researchers note that the study can help organizations looking out for unethical behavior know when to deploy their limited resources. (Meanwhile, another recent study shows who's more likely to cheat in a relationship.)