Imagine that: Moral values ‘inoculate’ against cheating

While preparing last month’s issue of Legatus magazine with its emphasis on the relationship of psychology and religion, a pair of brief items in the April 2023 issue of Psychology Today magazine caught my attention.

First came an article by Gurit Birnbaum, a psychology professor at Reichman University in Herzliya, Israel, about infidelity in romantic relationships, titled “Is Infidelity Contagious?” In the course of her essay, Birnbaum describes the results of a recent study suggesting that people who are exposed to the infidelity of others become less committed to their own relationships and more likely to desire or commit acts of infidelity themselves.
 
Birnbaum asks what might help someone “inoculate” himself or herself against this influence toward infidelity. She cites another study’s findings that a person is made stronger against infidelity by “deliberately considering your partner’s perspective” whenever temptations toward infidelity arise. Other studies, she notes, “have found that committing to a moral code, and reminding yourself of the negative emotional consequences of breaking it” could help one rise above such temptations.

On the same page of the magazine, an even shorter piece examined the real burning question of the day: “Who Cheats at Wordle?” Invented, oddly enough, by a guy named Wardle, Wordle — for those unfamiliar until now — is a daily web-based game in which the player must guess a five-letter word in six tries, with visual clues given each round for the accuracy of the selected letters and positions — sort of like the old Mastermind board game. Although Wordle is not a competition and there are no prizes to be won, what ought to be a simple solitary diversion has nevertheless become a cause for cheating — and yet another study.

It seems a pair of researchers checked out how often people in each U.S. state search online for terms like “Wordle answer” and “today’s Wordle.” They then compared the results to “each state’s religiosity and cultural tightness.” (I’m not sure how one quantifies “religiosity and cultural tightness,” or even what the latter phrase means, but that’s what the article said.)
 
The results? Those dastardly, no-good Wordle cheaters were more commonly found in “looser, less religious states” than in “more religious, tighter states.” (For those wondering, the hotbed of Wordle frauds seems to be in Vermont.)

I can’t speak for how well these studies fare under peer review. But it’s interesting to note how a leading psychology journal is pointing out research that seems to discover anew what ought to be self-evident: that people with firmer commitments to moral and ethical values are more inclined to behave in a moral and ethical manner. 

Go figure.