THE HUMAN CONDITION / DECEPTIONS : Our Cheating Hearts

It has been--to crib a bit from Charles Dickens--the best of times for cheats and crooks, the worst of times for honest people. Or so it seems to many pulse-takers of the down-and-dirty ‘80s and the so-called “gentler” current decade.

The parade of the morally tainted has caused professional ethicists to ask not who’s been cheating, but rather who has not.

“It’s harder and harder to be an honest person,” laments moral tastemaker Michael Josephson, head of the Los Angeles-based Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute for the Advancement of Ethics. “You feel like a jerk in a world where other people are getting ahead by taking shortcuts.”

Sissela Bok, professor of ethics at Brandeis University and author of “Lying,” a classic work on honesty, concurs: “The ‘80s has been a very problematic period” for morals, one colored by “a tremendous me-first attitude,” she says. “We’ve had such bad examples from the worlds of business and government.”

Of course, people have always had an ambiguous relationship with the truth. William Shakespeare picked up plots for his plays wherever he could, while, in his essay on liars, the French philosopher Montaigne warned his readers that adding lie upon lie was like trying to forever patch a leaky roof.

“Everybody knows what it’s like to cheat,” Bok declares. They fudge on their income taxes, purchase term papers, puff up resumes, clip their age, nibble food in the grocery store, take credit for things they didn’t do.

But ethicists say cheating appears to be increasing. “There are indications that there are more efforts at deception of all kinds,” says Bok, who regularly confers with business and government leaders. Josephson, who lectures politicians and CEOs on the value of integrity, scoffs, “It’s not only bad, it’s getting worse.”

For instance:

* Nearly one in four people thinks it is all right to cheat on their car insurance, according to a recent opinion survey by the Roper Organization.

* More than half of 6,000 college students polled across the country in a Emporia State University project said they had cheated at some point.

* In their book “The Day America Told the Truth,” published last June, authors James Patterson and Peter Kim report that 97% of 5,700 people interviewed nationwide admitted they had lied.

* One-third of married Americans interviewed in the Patterson-Kim survey said they had cheated on their spouses.

People cheat, says Bok, for one of three principal reasons: They say to themselves that they’re just telling a little white lie (“It doesn’t hurt anybody. Who cares?”); they feel obliged to cheat because of a crisis (“I don’t usually do this, but here I really have to.”); or they think everybody else is playing the game.

People have also become just plain selfish, Josephson asserts. “It’s a world of ‘I wants.’ Basically whatever I want I need, whatever I need I deserve. Whatever I deserve I have a right to have.”

“American society has brought cheating on itself,” notes Neil Smelser, a UC Berkeley sociologist who observes broad behavioral movements. The urge to beat the system is “stacked into the cultural cards,” because of high premiums on materialism and success. “We bring our children up to accept those values,” he adds.

Whatever the motivation, cheaters have traditionally found creative ways to break the rules, and one of the most challenging grounds on which to tackle the system has been that of income tax reporting.

For instance, in 1990, when the IRS declared that dependents must be identified by a Social Security number, 7 million names vanished from federal income tax reports. According to Rob Giannangeli, a spokesman in the Los Angeles office of the IRS, little George was often the family beagle and Isabele, the cat.

If rationalizing that a cat is a child seems peculiar, buying up canned term papers has become so blatant that firms advertise in publications such as the Rolling Stone.

In surveying the wares of a Los Angeles company being sued by the University of California, a UC professor (requesting anonymity) reports that the firm’s catalogue offers several thousand term papers--studies of the works of D. H. Lawrence or Mark Twain for English majors, papers on sexual abuse and wife-battering for sociology students, Spinoza for budding philosophers. The professor even found a term paper on his own work. “It was awful! A C-minus,” he blasts.

People who cheat in college and on the job are often those, says USC psychology professor Chaytor Mason, “who don’t think they’re smart enough to make it by themselves. One of the greatest threats people feel is being considered unacceptable or stupid.”

In the view of Kevin Murphy, a Colorado State University psychologist who recently completed a book, “Honesty in the Workplace,” there are two sorts of people who cheat at the office. “People who have a low level of commitment perpetrate acts against the organization, from embezzlement to calling in sick to get a day off.”

On the other hand, overly committed employees may defend unsafe products, approve fraudulent tests or cover up inspection reports, for instance.

“These things are done by people who think they are helping the organization,” says Murphy. “People talk about these crimes for the organization as if they were being altruistic. They believe they are necessary to compete.”

For some, however, cheating the company can take a more original twist. An engineer (who, like most others interviewed, requested that his name not be used), had been working for a Los Angeles firm for two years when he decided to move to a higher-paying position with a firm on the next floor. He fully intended to resign his first job--until he realized he could handle them both, since his work, surveying buildings, was in the field.

The scheme went well for about six weeks. Then one day the engineer was riding up the elevator with the president of the new firm when the president of the old firm stepped in. When the hapless double-engineer failed to get off with president No. 2, he was asked if he wasn’t making a mistake.

“It was really too close for comfort,” says the now single-salaried man, who immediately gave up his first post.

For Suzy Soro, a stand-up comedian newly arrived in Los Angeles, ageism and sexism are partners in a show-biz bias that doesn’t allow women to age. Which is why Soro has remained 35 for the past two years.

But snipping a few years off the calendar isn’t as simple as it might seem; indeed, it requires unforeseen historical calculations. “If you say you were born in 1960, you have to remember that you don’t know anything from before that time,” Soro points out. “And if you were 4 when the Beatles were around, how come you can sing every one of their songs?”

Yet if expediency nudges people over the moral boundary line, most do not cheat regularly, Bok affirms. “They have a kind of internal barrier that tells them, ‘I’m not the kind of person who does this.’ That internal barrier is the basis of self-respect.”

However, Bok adds, there are “many others who vacillate according to circumstances. They don’t connect the lie they tell in one situation with the idea that they are honest. They haven’t thought it through.”

For example, a New York attorney vows that he “would never dream “ of saying he painted the pictures in his home. But what about the photographs in his office?

Taken by a travel companion, they feature scenes from Tahiti to Egypt, and over the years admiring them has become pro forma courtesy among his clients.

The problem is, he explains with lawyerly logic, that they always ask double questions: “ ‘Oh, are these pictures from your travels? Did you take them?’

“It puts me in a funny position. Do I say, ‘Yes, these are all pictures from my trip, but, no, I can’t take pictures’?

“I always say ‘sure,’ ” he says--to both questions.

Perhaps the most politically correct conscience-soother of the times is “I’m no worse than anyone else.”

“When you ask people why they cheat, they say they never think they’re doing anything wrong,” says Murphy. “The real rules of the game are that this is OK.”

A Santa Monica resident allows that her food-nibbling in grocery stores--a handful of trail mix here, a few cookies there--had its genesis when she was a 9-year-old in Catholic school, filching bags of M & Ms with friends. Dressed in their proper uniforms, the girls would slip the candy into their book bags, then run outside and wolf down the evidence.

The food thief, now in her 20s, still regards her illicit munchings as a “little sin God won’t notice.”

“You feel the store owes you something,” she says. “You spend $100 there. They should let you eat at least a cookie, for goodness sake.”

But while cheating seems to be on the rise in some quarters, ethics appears to be making a comeback of its own. According to studies, Josephson states, more than “90% of adults say they want to be considered ethical.” And Bok adds that the number of ethics courses in the country is up by several thousands over 10 years ago.

Students, Bok says, want to prepare themselves “so they won’t fall into some of these traps.”

Indeed, in the case of a young man from El Paso, Tex., temptation wouldn’t leave him alone. When he withdrew $40 from his bank one day, he discovered he’d gotten $200 instead.

The pangs of conscience began to twang. But when a bank representative phoned trying to trace the error, he denied receiving the cash. After all, why hadn’t he brought it back?

Then the fantasies began: “I thought, oh, I’m going to go to the 7-Eleven and the alarms are going to go off. I’m going to be handcuffed. I’m going to be on the front page of the newspaper. I’m going to lose my job and be a disgrace to my family.”

Waiting for the cover of dark, the man drove into the bank parking lot, killing his headlights, and slipped the packet, along with a note, into the night-deposit slot.

Then he breathed the long deep sigh of an honest man--until the following month.

Then he once again withdrew $40, only this time the bonanza was $500.

This time the terrified benefactor returned the lucre in person. The bank president served him coffee and told him she would personally handle any loans he might desire.

“They made it very clear I didn’t have to return the money,” the man says wistfully.