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September 10, 2014 People Cheat More if a Task Is Harder than Expected 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 7% 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 behavior appears to have been triggered by the participants' attempts to reconcile a disconnect between their expected and actual performance. SOURCE: Dangerous Expectations: Breaking Rules to Resolve Cognitive Dissonance

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