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For all his great accomplishments, Barry Bonds is likely to be remembered most for being convicted of obstructing justice. It appears that Bonds, like many baseball heros, succumbed to the use of steroids to enhance performance. But unlike many, Bonds worked really hard to try to convince people he didn't. The question that interests us isn't only how did it come to this, but what does it mean going forward for aspiring athletes?
In the psychological battle for optimal living, it's usually a battle of short-term vs. long-term interests. It's no different in baseball. Long-term: don't cheat and take steroids as it's almost inevitable that your cheating will one day be uncovered, and with that, your career and fame will take a nose dive. Short-term: take the steroids as you need to win the batting title this year! It's a delicate battle, and not one with a clear winner, at least in the aggregate sense. Not all players took steroids after all. But why did some?
There are undoubtedly many forces that play into the battle to tip the mental scales to one side or the other. In the present case, one of the most interesting may stem from the old analogy: one bad apple spoils the bunch. Truly clever experiments by Francesca Gino and her colleagues have provided scientific proof to back up this adage. Specifically, they exposed individuals who were individually taking tests in a group to cheating by one of the group members (the cheater worked for the experimenters and cheated in a way that couldn't be missed by the rest of the true participants). The better people did on the test, the more money they earned. Now, the cheater reported his scores to the experimenter first and reported doing extremely well (read: earning big $). What happened next was the interesting part. Participants who were exposed to the cheater's actions inflated their scores as well, reporting they performed much better than they actually did (unbeknownst to participants, researchers had a devious way of checking their actual vs. their reported scores). No such "enhanced performance" occurred among participants who weren't exposed to cheating.
What these findings show is behavior that, at its hear, follows another adage: Monkey See, Monkey Do. Simply seeing someone cheat increases the likelihood that any of us will seek the short-term gain and cheat as well. One person's bad behavior can spread like a contagion. So, for Bonds, his cheating may not have seemed so bad, as other big starts were doing it. But what about for his legions of young baseball fans? The message, even at a subconscious level, is that the short-term should be favored. It doesn't matter what's coming down the road; get what you need in the here and now. In many ways, this radiating effect of cheating may be the most pernicious part of his legacy.
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