I always find these video logs to be a very inefficient way to communicate. Having watched through the whole thing, the main argument that Ariely is making here is that there is a much larger problem than just the "Lance Armstrong problem." People do these PEDs because they have a sense that "everyone else is doing it."
Now, it's not clear if everyone else was doing it in this case, or whether the crooks were convinced (falsely) that everyone else was doing it. Ariely doesn't draw this distinction, but it is critical. If you want to clean up the sport, it's not sufficient to make sure that everyone is clean. It has to be so sparkling clean that no one should even suspect that others could be cheating. Unless all the participants are convinced that everyone else is clean, they will have the motivation to cheat themselves, which in turn makes others cheat, and so forth.
And the vlog didn't get into Armstrong's psychology. I would have liked to hear how the cognitive dissonance between his private reality and public (fake) persona change his personality. I would suspect that, even if one does not begin the game as a sociopath, living for decades with a lie would turn one into a sociopath.
> Now, it's not clear if everyone else was doing it in this case, or whether the crooks were convinced (falsely) that everyone else was doing it.
It's professional cycling... pretty much everybody that made it to the top was doing it.
Yeah there are probably exceptions, but the pervasiveness of doping in cycling is surreal. If you're actually in the top echelon and stand a chance of winning, there's a very good chance that some of your chief competitors are doping. Obviously this puts even good people in a real quandary...
Now, it's not clear if everyone else was doing it in this case, or whether the crooks were convinced (falsely) that everyone else was doing it. Ariely doesn't draw this distinction, but it is critical. If you want to clean up the sport, it's not sufficient to make sure that everyone is clean. It has to be so sparkling clean that no one should even suspect that others could be cheating. Unless all the participants are convinced that everyone else is clean, they will have the motivation to cheat themselves, which in turn makes others cheat, and so forth.
And the vlog didn't get into Armstrong's psychology. I would have liked to hear how the cognitive dissonance between his private reality and public (fake) persona change his personality. I would suspect that, even if one does not begin the game as a sociopath, living for decades with a lie would turn one into a sociopath.