Role Of Cheating In Steven D. Levitt's Freakonomics

Almost everybody has been tempted to cheat at one point or another in their lives. Cheating is just a part of human nature. People will do anything possible to give themselves an advantage over others. In their book Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner explore the human tendency to cheat to gain an advantage over others. Many people believe experts in a subject are working in their favor. When somebody hires a real estate agent, he or she expects that agent to work as hard as he or she can to sell his or her house. In reality, the incentive for the agent is usually to sell the house quickly but for a slightly lower price, allowing the agent to move on to more clients. Levitt postulates that experts “use their informational

Everybody is tempted to cheat in everyday life, and many people do cheat. W.C. Fields, a famous American entertainer, once claimed that “a thing worth having,” and thus a thing worth working for, is also “a thing worth cheating for” (Levitt 18). People will always find a way to cheat for something if they want it enough. Cheating does not have to be what one might conventionally think of as cheating, it can involve any situation in which somebody bends or breaks the rules to gain a personal advantage. As Levitt explains it, cheating can be something as simple as taking a $1 bagel without paying for it (Levitt 36). Stealing something that barely has any monetary value is still bending the rule to gain an advantage, no matter how small it is. A Stanford statistician’s research suggests that people “understand that cheating is wrong” but still cheat anyways” (Isakov 1). People know that cheating is considered morally wrong, but many still do it. This is because morality “represents an ideal world,” but it does not represent how “the actual world works” (Levitt 132). Moral principles are just guidelines that people want to follow, but most people end up deviating from those core principles in their everyday lives. The result is a world in which people do not always follow the guiding moral principles they hold, and can thus be liable to