The impact of a partner’s perceived effort and partnership duration on cheating

Collaboration with a partner can lead to more cheating behaviour than would occur individually, but much is unknown about the social factors contributing to this tendency. In two preregistered experiments we investigate the effects of commitment to one’s partner and reward structure on cheating in a sequential dyadic die-rolling paradigm. In Experiment 1, we manipulated two features of the social context: perceived effort investment by one’s partner and the duration of partnership. We found that participants cheated more when they perceived that their partner exerted high effort, which was significant in the short partnership condition. Moreover, participants cheated more individually post-collaboration than they had pre-collaboration, showing that collaborative cheating may carry over into subsequent behaviour. In Experiment 2, we manipulated who received each round’s rewards. Participants cheated more for joint rewards, but less when they were the reward recipients and perceived that their partner exerted high effort.