Hello im ray suarez. If youre a writer you cant use someone elses work without attribution. If youre a securities trader, you cant use trades with information from forbidden sources. If r in professional sports, a world formatively bound by rules and regulations you cant play with equipment altered to give you alone an advantage over your opponent. In all those cases to do otherwise is simply cheating. Do people do it . What do we know about cheating . If people dont do it think it . The question at the heart of the deflate gate is easy to ask and hard to answer. Was new England Patriots star Quarterback Tom Brady a cheater . I dont believe so. Ive always played within the rules, i wouldnt do anything to break the rules. I believe in fair play and respect the league and everything that theyre doing to compete a competitive Playing Field for all the nfl teams. The nfl and the patriots are smack in the spotlight and not simply because its less than a week before the super bowl sunday. Why would they do Something Like that . It just doesnt make any sense. Deflate gate, or if you prefer ball ghazi beat the Indianapolis Colts 457. Did the patriots deflate the balls to get a leg up, so to speak. I have followed every rule to the letter. Of all the football ive handled this past week. I cant tell a difference if there is an onepound difference or half a pound difference in any of the football. The league has clear rules. The football must have apressure ofpressure of one and a half to two pounds of pressure. More attention will be given to the pigskin to ensure that for super bowl xlix is probably inflateed. Why get the edge on a team that you crush on the field. Are the football tossed by the patriots in the afc championship game simply the result of Natural Forces . When we cheat do we roll the dice . Do cheaters believe that no one will ever know that theyre likely to pull it off . Well begin with al jazeera Sports Correspondent michael yves nice to have you with us. Good to be here, ray. Is this a big deal . It depends on who you ask if you go by the letter of the law it is cheating, and for decades the integrity of the game is a very important issue to the National Football league. If that is the case, then they should take thisery seriously because something did happen. Whether it was Bill Belichick tom brady or someone on the equipment staff who did it on their own accord, something happened to those balls and they could say that it gave tom brady and the patriots the advantage. But there were v been no have there been any fines given yet . No, they are continuing the investigation. Some felt that some punishment needed to be done before the super bowl, but the last thing they want is for something to occur before the super bowl. They interviewed 40 people in the League Officials but one of the people they had yet to talk to was tom brady and tom brady said that he does not think that they will talk to him until after the super bowl. So he does not believe that it will happen before the game on sunday. This is an actual football. Its not a game ball but its regulation size, and i guess i have to attempt a 240mile pass. Are you open . Im wide open. What advantage is conferred by having the ball softer than normal . This is from an athletes perspective. A scientist can speak to some of the other aspects the physical aspects of catching the ball. But lets take a quarterback. If i can squeeze this ball a little bit more than a ball that is overinflated i can secure it more when people are rushing at me and trying to get this ball out of my hand. Also in cold or slick conditions the better grip i have, the better accuracy i have in my hands. But its not just quarterbacks. If youre a running back, and you tuck the ball in, as they try to get you to the ground, they are a he also trying to strip you of the ball. If i can squeeze it in, i can hold it better than if its over inflated. And then if the ball hits you and it gives, you can catch it better than opposed to a ball that has more air to it. There are competitive advantages to it. It is also preference. Some quarterbacks like less air and some like more air it depends on the player and the conditions theyre playing in. Are these differences marginal . Is it the difference between winning and losing . Without advanced pro long study, its hard to say. But if it makes you feel better to have a little bit of a grip youre going to have more confidence in what youre doing. Youre not going to worry about it coming out loosely or off target. And thats one less thing to think about. Well say this about professional athletes. They all have preferences with their equipment. Whether its a football player, a golfer, all professional athletes have their preferences. If they have it, its one less thing for them to think about. Is this a distraction leading up to sunday . Oh, absolutely. It totally is. And you know, Bill Belichick came out and had another press conference over the weekend trying to deflect this away from the team as they go to phoenix for the super bowl. But the media day is tomorrow. Thats the largest media grouping that you have during super bowl week. Everyone on that team will be asked about deflate gate. And the seahawks will be asked about it as well. The patriots are very good at keeping things out of their locker room, but this is going to be the topic of conversation all the way up to sunday because the league a has yet to issue any time of punishment. Al jazeera, Sports Correspondent, michael yves, for the record, my preferred receiverred he showed some shorthands. Thank you for being with us, age. No problem, ray. When we return to inside story, well be told by an admitted cheater who has told his own story and jake ward, there has been plenty of research into why and when we try to bend the rules. Stay with us. Theres more to finical news than the ups and downs of the dow. For instance, could striking workers in greece delay your retirement . Im here to make the connections to your money real. Youre watching inside story on al jazeera america. Im ray suarez. Every day somewhere in america somebody gets an edge, an advantage, skews the results gains competition gets a leg up on the competition in it may be large or small. It may beage election or some personal goal or achievement. Joining me for the rest of the program to talk about the inner game of cheating, len len regard copelson and al jazeeras science and Technology Correspondent jake ward. Good to have you with us. Professor, let me first start with you. When did you first start handing in other peoples work as your own, and what was the reason why . The first of my three or four acts of plagiarism occurred when i was eight years old and it happened because i found myself in a ridiculous situation during a teacher strike. Parents had set up an Ad Hoc School in the neighborhood, and some guy who obviously didnt care about the classroom itself assigned an impossible he is e ssay. And just to get it done i transcribed an encyclopedia entry and he didnt read it and gave me an a. Later when the stakes were much higher and my motivation much more complicated i did such a thing once or two more. I felt it need to publicly confess and put it all behind me. You went into the academic life its an unusual choice after gaining entrance into the system as did you. That motivated me to publish a book on these transgressions that i and myriad of academics were guilty of. It wasnt that i felt i would get caught. I needed to clear my conference by making my active confession. Jake ward have we asked a lot of questions about why and when people cheat . Its a fundamental question of human kind, and really the answer is all of nature is all about deception. The purposes of deception is clear. We fool each other all the time. Mimicry camouflage, subterfuge, thats how one company will get a leg on another. The beetle parasite forms together and mimics and dresses up as a female bee and then the male bee will mate with what it thinks is a female bee and then it is filled with parasite. Its a funny thing across nature rand why humans think this would be the exception when, in fact, its the rule in the rest of nature. Jake, we put in, unlike the blister beetle, we put in a scaffolding of laws around Human Behavior trying to get people to stop doing that. While others do it for advantage, arent we humans riskaverse . Thats part of it. When you look at the risk, and the professor talks about the stakes getting higher and high center life. The stakes are everything. The fundamental evolutionary driver is the desire to sort of survive the founding work to looking at why deception and cheat something a big part of human nature. In the 1970s they came up with the idea of the risk you talk about, the risk of being found out is great at rationalizing. Great at accept deception and the logic being that deception is something that we give away with physical science our eyes widen and our skin grows clammy. That could give us away, get us killed expelled, there are all sorts of stakes at work there. Self deception is the best possible way to tamper down those side effects of this. Human beings take what weve been given with what were born and weve raised it to a high art. That is true when it companies to cheating and deception. Professor was it ever a separate and distinct episode . Was it to stand on the shoulders of what came before . Was the fact that you had done this once or twice before changed the way you thought about it the next time you got ready to do it . These acts were all small enter acts, and by doing that, came to understand why many of my own students result to plagiarism. While i would not do these again, it made me a more effective teacher. Many cases are quite individual, and they have to be treated very carefully. Give us some examples. What are some of the reasons that your own students give you when the jig is up for having cheated . Its not so much that they give me these reasons i figure them out. He or she may have contempt for my classroom situation and they wont put effort into it if the teach isnt going to. Or they may not feel up to the task and they want to please me. With blinders on, they think all they need to do is come up with the text that will make me happen. I will take the student aside and say that i suspect you just didnt think that you couldnt do this assignment, in which case you should have told me, and i would have figured out a helped them figure out a way to do it. I wouldnt report them, give them another assignment, and see what they can do on their own. Can you punish them heavily after your own experience . Well, in the right situation i would. If it was a senior who i heard had been doing this many times and was on his or her way to law school and he was only lazy and contempt for the classrooms, that would warrant the kind of punishment that is the only thing that could turn life around. Jake ward are this situations where there is not that much at stake, but there is a certain slice sly of us who do it just for the kick. The thrilled of getting something over on somebody else . I think that is an interesting concept. I dont think that the research currently supports it. Generally when you look back, especially when youre talking about academic cheating youre talking about a specific motivate aggravating factors. We have data going back to 1938 on the nature of cheating, and why it is that it takes place. You have the same motivations that are mentioned here. The first one is typically to get good grades. Its a an outcomemotivated situation, and one of the suggestions then has been teaching should stop emphasizing that you need an a versus a b versus a c and instead get into mastery of the subject and the desire to really under it is one of the great ways to put aside cheating. But the other big one is, as you mentioned the same way that an eightyearold had sort of contempt for his environment thats the kind of thing that drives a lot of people to cheat. Its contempt for the environment. Its the feeling that some how the assignment was not fair. The amount of time was not reasonable. Its become a standard victim to have them explain why it is that theyre getting this much time, this much work, trying to really get buyin from the students to understand that this seems like a reasonable thing that is requested of me and then there is the impulse to puck the system and its sort of breaking out of what one feels is sort of an unfair system, and its simple kicks. And when you get into that its social pathic that one does not find typically in the reason for cheating. The notion that everyone does it make us a society of cutting corners. Are you a champ or church . Chump. Were back with inside story on al jazeera america. Im ray suarez. Unless youre a strong believeer in coincidence you would to believe that someone let all the air out of the gape balls used in the first half by the new England Patriots in the recent rout of the Indianapolis Colts. Were looking at unfair advantage in all its varied forms. Still with us, professor of English Literature in the university of iowa and al jazeera science correspondent jake ward. Professor, its gotten trickier to cheat in college. I have two young adults all the way through the process. I dont think either of them cheated, but they told me about all the programs that exist to run written work through to match against known existing papers the idea that you could buy a paper that was used at another college and hand it to a professor with strong confidence that he never would have seen these words before has gone away and still even in that atmosphere people still try it. Why do they do that . Well, there are others ways to do it. You can pay people to write your papers for you and many teachers like myself try to concoct assignment that is simply cannot be plagiarized. But thats why we ask our students to do this, but the reasons can be more complicated than i indicated in the previous segment of the show. The motivation could be unconscious to the student. It could be identification with peoples whose work theyre stealing or even identification with the professor. Difficult to deal with. But i dont agree that plagiarism is basically going away because students can be found out ease by teachers googling a couple of phrases on the internet or using a program like turn it in so the search is done by the professor but its more rampant than usual because the idea of what college is has changed for many students. Something to be gotten through to get a degree, to get a job not really mattering how you get the grades, but simply that you do it. I went to college a very long time ago and i can barely recognize the scene that im currently living in. Jake ward, the Economic Science has identified more and more winner take all marketplaces where the awards for cheating are not just nice to have, but they are fabulous and all the time were laying on more pressure to not cheat new sec regulations new inspections of documents that are handed along where youre assured you are not cheating, and yet the rewards are so tremendous that must figure in to the calculation that each cheater has to make before he or she flips the switch. Thats absolutely right ray. You cannot imagine a system where the sort of the rules and the rewards are sort of more at odds than certainly the academic system. Certainly athletics professional athletics, which is what weve been talking about here in terms of the news. Its really kind of perverse the way that the system that we work in tries very hard to break students down as much as possible to a set of numbers, a gpa, and track them into this or that outcome based on the grades that they get. Yet, at the same time were trying to teach them to prize mastery of the subject over the grades themselves. Which is science is one of the great motivations behind cheating. That is certainly no more true than athletics where you just need a really fabulous set of rules. Lawyers i think will always have a job designing the rules of systems like this because you simply need something that is absolutely iron clad. Absolutely watertight. The sheer pressure to get ahead with grades or get ahead with winning a game, the rewards are so unbelievable, as you say. Earlier you mentioned the idea that people rationalize what theyre doing. Am i to take that to mean that a lot of people who cheat dont even really think theyre cheaters. Thats exactly right. The Research Shows that people who cheat have no sense that theyre cheaters. Studies from academic cheating to infidelity, which is an interesting subject when it comes to social psychology say it was not me or it was a temporary period of time. There are these very extraordinary psychological studies done of people who are unfaithful to their partners, where you first have to come up with a way of getting them to think about being unfaithful and identify that way and then get them to the group that has been identified as being unfaithful, and get them to talk about their motivations. But the psychologists who have created these brilliant Research Systems for doing that, they decipher that people who do cheat, people who are unfaithful inevitably saying this is a specific transgression and it is not who i am. It plays into the larger biology of menu kind which is great at forgetting the mistakes, the trauma, like wild birth we only remember the good things and continue to do it again. The mind is flexible when it comes to being bulletproof you let it bounce right off you and let it go on with your life. Was it cathartic to call your book life of a plaguerist . It was but it wasnt even my title. But the book is enoughtive, its creative nonfiction what i mean its a satire on the readers themselves as well as the confession that im avowing then im happy with the title. I want to Say Something about rationalization. Jake watered was with us from san francisco. Professor copelson with us from iowa. That brings us to the end of this edition of inside story. Thanks for being with us. Coming up at 6 00 p. M. Eastern on al jazeera america, a victory over isil. After a month Kurdish Forces have retaken the city of kobane, but most say its a symbolic win with a huge price. Were keeping an eye on the huge snow tournament moving alone the northeast. Several governors have already declare states of emergency. And what the a drone crash teaches us about the security at the white house. That and more coming up at 6 00. Were in the mexican state of veracruz, one of the most violent areas in the country. This is el diamante ranch it is here where the remains of 31 people were found a month ago. The bodies were dumped in a mass grave just below this house. Those who were killed are believed to have been held here after they were kidnapped. Only a few of the bodies have been identified. Kidnappings have increased