To cheat is to compete?

The Ohio Department of Agriculture has recently suspended two brothers for "tampering" with their prized cows before showing them at the Ohio State Fair. To make the animal's back appear straighter -- which is apparently a desirable feature in cows -- the brothers glued and painted extra hair on their backs. They were given away when a clump of hair came off in the judge's hand. In the high stakes world of livestock shows, anything goes. \nIt's difficult to escape competitiveness. As Americans, we're pretty much born with a scorecard in our hand. Sure, it all starts innocently enough with baby beauty pageants and elementary school spelling bees, but it starts to get serious in high school when each and every student is ranked according to our grade point average -- which will be listed on each and every college application -- to determine our worthiness. \nOn a positive note, competition makes us all try a little bit harder and identifies people with exceptional talents. We like the idea, for example, that the doctor who would perform surgery on us would be above average. But competition has a sinister side effect. To get ahead, some people think a little too far outside the box … they cheat. \nIn a new book called "The Cheating Culture" by David Callahan, the author raises an interesting idea -- we have become so competitive and obsessed with being number one, we are willing to cut corners and cheat. There's no shortage of examples. \nIn the world of business, there is Enron, WorldCom, and maybe even the loveable homemaker-turned-tycoon, Martha Stewart. \nThe world of sports also offers plenty of examples from the past year. A couple of years ago, they were Super Bowl competitors -- this year, four players on the Oakland Raiders were caught with THG, a performance enhancing drug. Then there was the incident where Sammy Sosa "accidentally" picked up a corked bat. Major League Baseball finally came clean and admitted up to 7 percent of its players weren't clean. \nPart of the problem, as Callahan points out in his book, is the more convinced a person is that others are cheating, the more likely they are to cheat themselves. \nSo is cheating getting worse? That's what I asked Professor Michael Metzger, who teaches an ethics course at the Kelley School of Business. \nCheating, he reminded me, has always been around and it's difficult to actually measure. But he too cautioned the more people cheat, the less honesty pays. \nAs students, we are keenly aware of competition. Our grades are often based on how well our classmates did on the same assignments. If more students become convinced other students are cheating, it would seem they would be more likely to do so themselves. Buying a paper online, or borrowing liberally from someone else's work is, one might think, the only plausible ticket to a coveted spot at a top tier law school -- just as gluing hair on a cow may have been the only way to win top honors at a state fair. \n Even in the political world, one can see the effects of cheating. Many of us carry around an unspoken notion that for someone to truly succeed in politics, they must have played their fair share of dirty tricks and simply avoided getting caught. So we look at them with a mix of admiration and disgust. \nWhat does this all say about our society? Maybe it is time to seriously reevaluate our collective fixation on competition. Like my middle school football coach used to say, "It's not whether you win or lose, its how you play the game." \nIt would be nice if we could learn how to say it without laughing.