An article about the relation between the honesty of people and their willingness to cheat. It quotes a new research, from RSM, revealing that willpower, (aka “cognitive control” in psychology speak), does not serve the same purpose for everyone.
PhD candidate Sebastian Speer, lead author of the paper, explains the following: “Surprisingly, we found that for honest participants, more cognitive control was needed to cheat, whereas for participants who cheated frequently, control was needed in order to be honest”. Professor Maarten Boksem reinforces this explanation by stating that these findings speak to the age-old question of whether people are at their core moral or immoral. “The answer, it turns out, is ‘it depends’: individuals are distributed along a continuum ranging from extremely honest, to dishonest."