50 Comments to “Thoughts on Lance Armstrong”
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Hi, I’m Dan Ariely. I do research in behavioral economics and try to describe it in plain language. These findings have enriched my life, and my hope is that they will do the same for you.
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In an experiment on cheating I ran as an undergrad project, one of the participants said she cheated because, after she had ascended to the top position in a multi-turn game, she felt anxiety about losing her status as the leader, even though the rules were clear that cheating had a high risk of discovery.
It’s funny how quickly everyone wants to villify Armstrong, yet nobody is looking at the other 9 finishers in the top 10 of any race he won to see if they were clean, too.
I grew up playing baseball and tried out for a Major League farm team once, obviously not making it. But if I had, taking PEDs would have been very tempting. Especially when you look at the millions of dollars in difference of the contract value between someone that gets on base 7 out of 25 at bats a week (.280) vs. getting on base 8 out of 25 (.320) at bats a week.
Dan, This is really excellent. I love your large thinking. I forwarded this post to an enormous network of CEO colleagues around the world. 15,000 to be precise. Thanks. Have a great wknd. tom
The question that is interesting to me is why he confessed – and confessed so publicly. My thought is that he is actually an attention junkie and when the attention he got as a cyclist faded away after he retired he needed a new way to get his “fix”. Funny, I actually think less of him, not for doping, but for confessing.
He confessed to get a shot at getting his lifetime ban lifted… very simple and clear motive
This is a great analysis of why Mr. Armstrong could have convinced himself of acting the way he did. Greg LeMond, now the only American winner of the Tour de France ( and who Inspired me at the time to get on a racing bike), made an excellent point in response to Mr. Armstrong….that if his teammates had taken the same drugs as he did, they might have won the Tour instead of him, but the fact that he controlled all the drugs taken, that did not happen.
I guess cheating for him was also a competition!!
The thing most interesting to me is the level to which he aggressively defended himself over the years. He could have chosen to let the London Times report just go–the way many baseball cheaters have let reports go. Instead he chose to sue for libel–and he WON! So he collected another $500K for aggressively going after accusers. That, to me, takes his deceit to a whole new level. Other than noting the Times is considering suing to get the judgment back, no one seems to be commenting on this. Clemens, Sosa, McGwire, etc. haven’t sued anyone; nor have any cyclists I know of. Only Armstrong. That’s material to me.
I agree that patterns of behavior can more easily emerge when groupthink is at work. Maybe its a human condition (unavoidable?) that we need to test boundaries — see a wet paint sign and want to just touch it to see if it is really wet) Maybe higher confidence in people with powerful roles/jobs/celebrities is correlated with greater risk-taking? Or, maybe they feel fear about losing ground, not being able to maintain their status, maybe this leads them to the pack behavior? I wonder if the need for group identification cuts across all socioeconomic boundaries? Once you have arrived at the pinnacle of your career, top of your game do you feel more compelled to conform to groupthink (this is not my field or expertise but this is fascinating stuff)
Eileen, considering how Greg Lemond won the tour chances are he was doping too. I now believe that everyone was taking something to improve performance. Everyone rider who testified only did so because they got caught. I’m not defending Armstrong just saying he only came clean, no pun intended, because he got caught just like all the rest of the cheats.
Lance Armstrong …Liar liar pants on fire and his nose is hanging on a telephone wire. Buzzzzzzzzzzz! Snap! Zap! and cooked rubber pants that crackle..Hee hee!
Dan, everything you say here is right except one thing:
Again, you go with the downloading digital files illegally! This is a very bad example to prove your otherwise excellent insights. The reason your students don’t feel bad downloading files is NOT BECAUSE EVERYONE IS DOING IT. The reason they don’t feel bad is THEY DID NOT DO ANYTHING WRONG. The law which restricts people from sharing is what is wrong.
http://questioncopyright.org/not_wrong
A better question is: why do YOU and why do lawmakers feel it is ok to compare a positive act that is a social good, namely sharing, with negative acts like cheating in sports or stealing things or attacking ships? The answer: “because everyone is doing it.” The lawmakers are ok taking away freedoms and demonizing sharing because all the other lawmakers are doing it too, and it happens to be good for them to keep getting campaign funding from Hollywood and to keep their positions of power.
With great respect for your main message,
Aaron
with or without it, he was the one riding on the bike.. up hill.
The tour’s best athletes used performace enhancing drugs. Lance beat them anyway because he used PEDs and was
more aerodynamic; he has one testicle.
Great post Dan, and I agree that it is a slippery slope, the charity/humanitarian side created the opportunity, there were others doing etc. That said it takes a special kind of sociopath to seek and sue and destroy former friends w/ lawsuits and character defamation while publicly living one of the most conspicuous lies perhaps ever… still, you have to give him credit for how innovative he was:
http://johnkcoyle.com/2013/01/18/lance-the-innovator/
One of the parts of this that really interests me is why winning and winning repeatedly was so important to him that he built up his beliefs that he had no choice in doing what he did. Was beating cancer not enough? was beating cancer and then competing in…and completing the Tour de France not enough? Had he made “winner” who he was and who he had to be…in a similar way to which we have made “liar” and “cheater” who he is. And the other thing I wonder is how we feel when we call him that. I have lied and do lie..so at what point do I stop being someone who lies and start being a liar?. Does having a very public, long term and significant history of lies to compare myself against help me minimise and justify all my “little fibs”?….hmmm maybe so……
Thank you for this video *it is easier to listen than to read pages and pages).
1. about downloading – I certainly dont feel well but also not particularly bad since the proprietor in most cases can prevent such activity.
2. I dont mind if somebody else download my own staff if and only ff it goes “into the right hands”, when – as you said, good people use it, and spread it.
3. about social acceptance – you are right, it is accepted socially but in a narrow sense, among bike people. I am not sure that the masses in Paris or elsewhere, including myself, approve such behavior. It is cheating and I cannot imagine myself standing if front of the cheering masses knowing what they dont.
This causes me to consider:
Does creation of a law (state, federal, etc) make me a criminal if I were legally doing the act prior to the law? What about prohibition? Might there be parallels? I am willing to bet that since prohibition was unpopular, there were people who felt justified in breaking the law.
Getting off track I know, but this argues for smaller government (regardless of political affiliation)
Maybe Lance reasoned/thought/decided that the law was unjust, did not apply to him, or had no merit? This would make it easier to break.
Speeding while driving is even more pervasive, crossing generations. The most honest people I know feel no remorse for speeding.
great video thanks a lot sir
Lots of self-righteous Lance-bashing now. Really? Didn’t you already know he was using drugs? I did. Did you believe his long-term denials? Not me.
Thanks Dan for a good description of how we cheat ourselves into cheating. I see there are some great insights here. But Lance Armstrong whether he is alone in doping or not, has a personality disorder that cannot be ignored. We should not forget his bullying, his aggressive and insensitive dealings with others who were close to him, his destruction of ambitious young riders who did not want to take drugs but careers dashed and destroyed by Lance’s active, aggressive and often frightening harassment. This sinister side to him cannot be ignored against all the other issues around sportsmen and women tempted to cheat.
It’s just a bicycle race…
some interesting points. but the real issue is not the doping, but the bad behavior after the fact (e.g., suing newspapers and individuals, teammates, hurting people who told the truth about his doping…).
Dear Mr Ariely,
I heard your interview regarding this subject on the radio and I have seen your video here. As everything else that you have done, I found your article very interesting and enlightening about why “normal” people cheat. But considering that you are a psychologist, I found disappointed that you didn’t see this, I would called it mildly, as a case of a person “without a conscience”, in the same terms of what Martha Stout mentioned in her work.
I am not a psychologist but my journalist instincts got off like crazy when I hear Mr. Armstrong talk. Granted that I haven’t ever met him or talk to him but all the traits of a “non conscience” person are there. I found this on an unscientific web search: …his sense of entitle to cheat, grandiose sense of himself, compulsive lying, lack of remorse and gilt, failure to accept responsibility for own actions, self-pity, manipulative personality covered by superficial charm, bullying as something ok. (http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/01/18/lance_armstrong_is_a_bully_oprah_interview.html) And, hey, why not?, substance abuse issues, too. The list is interminable.
Being a “non conscience” person is not illegal (their action might though), It is not their fault and even our modern society awards some of those traits. But we should be aware of the chances of finding this kind of people around us and question their lives, their sickness, their stories and all their achievements.
We got a possible case here…
Dan isn’t a psychologist. He is a behavioral economist. A psychologist tries to find out why individuals are crazy. Behavioral economists try to find out why everyone is crazy.
PS At least, you made me laugh.
w/out forgiving the transgressions. …our hunger for a symbolic hanging is always a little troubling No?. theory of justice? retribution eye for an eye? or more distributed? we seem pretty confident that making an example works …be a ceo go to jail, tailhook, martha stewart etc …does that really work? i wonder what most sergeant majors would say.
Interesting comment, can you explain what you mean by “…example works”? What is the evidence of working? Is it closure to those in the same group (the athletes) or everyone in the larger group (society?) My feeling on Lance Armstrong is more personal, it is just disappointment. I like a hero, I liked when he beat cancer, so now in my eyes this kind of colors my perception of him. In my mind whether I like it or not, I probably have linked Lance=doping forever (maybe I can blame the media). Maybe it’s just that I naturally expect MORE out of public figures? This is probably wrong but may be true.
There is right or wrong,He won it all through fraud and i can bet he has lost it all.Many people will fotget him soon and if they have to remember him at all,it will be because he doped to become successful and not that he won lots of tour de france.Marion Jones,Tim Montgomery & Ben Johnson are not remembered for what they won but for the shame they brought to the sport and to themselves.He denied this all the time. It is shameful and can never be justified in anyway.
I disagree with Dan that cheating is considered OK when you are doing it for a good cause. It only shows that the sport they loved as a kid is less valued by best sports personalities when money takes precedence. Yet, they are never satisfied when their own compatriots disrespect them time and again. I guess Lance wanted to come clean knowing that he was financially secure and wanted to be morally free of any guilt.
To vbehere – I don’t think that Dan is stating that cheating is OK when doing it for a good cause, rather that there is a tendency for us humans to rationalize cheating WHEN it is in support of a good cause. I could be wrong on this one.
@jen.b re “example of” what i meant was does it deter others in sports from cheating if we make an example from him? i’m not sure. does it repair the personal injuries done to others (ruined careers, lawsuits) prob not as u say. i think there something odd about the administrative law side of this. … i mean since he clearly was guilty we feel vindicated in the authorities – approach – “we never rest until we get our man” … but we kind of have a good cultural excuse for administrative agencies to prosecute a little more aggressively now. and what if the next guy isn’t guilty?
Cheats do prosper and if I have read Dan properly in his books they also want to think of themselves as ethical people and what better way to do that than to wait until you have made your millions then do the cathartic bit and confess your sins on international television (which you will probably get paid for as well) and take all the brickbats thrown at you. You can then say to yourself “see I did good and confessed so that makes up for the sin and now I am a good boy again. Just a heap richer but that is beside the point”. There is even a church or two that supports that model.
I agree. At the basic level, we had an honour-system at work. If you felt you had done a great job that day, you could dip into the “sugar jar” of lollie-snakes. My friend would regularly eat all the sweets in one day, then publicly confesss to being the one to eat all the sweets, then congratulate herself for her honesty, on a “journey” towards giving up sweets. Others would then support her on that “Journey”. Public contrition goes a long way in OTHER people’s heads.
wonderful analysis … for something else …. seems 2 b human nature to find revenge sweet, even (but not in this case) if it costs us … here’s a nice example http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=M5wk9bPgoHM
Who cares if Lance Armstrong cheated??? We have elected officials in the Senate that have not passed a budget since 2006. Our country is $16 trillion dollars in debt and we have re-elected a President that has continually had a $1.5 trillion dollar deficit. Why don’t we talk about the psychology of our elected officials running from their sworn duties???? Why don’t we talk about the psychology of why the MSM did not do their homework on Senator Obama’s lack of managerial experience???? Still on this subject how about the psychology of Eric Holder’s dismal failure on Operation “Fast & Furious” and Obama’s decision not to have him resign??? Or better yet the psychology of not balancing the budget???????????
Mark McGuire, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Lance Armstrong inconsequential footnotes in history that have no impact on the citizens of the US to make a decent living, have meaningful jobs, keep their homes and send their children to college!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Angry Pete, perhaps understanding how we relate to these footnotes, as you call them, will help us understand why accept what our politicians are doing to us
Hey Pete could it be that politicians are people too and their greatest fall from grace is that you and your “fellow Americans”, the people who continue to play their game by voting for them, provide them with opportunities to showcase their human foibles and benefit themselves and their germ lines while of course being able to justify it to themselves as an “entitlement” because after all they are making huge personal sacrifices for you the people. (And remember the next turkey you choose will gobble (up stuff) just and fast as the current ones because they are people too).
For us in the antipodes the worst bit about this when America eats green fruit we get the bellyache. Your weird greed based financial systems crash and we get to pay the price so Pete I support your attempt to seek change but would respectfully suggest that rather than a footnote, Lance Armstrong is a suppurating sore which is clearly indicative of a very unhealthy body.
Serious life support systems may be needed.
dear Dan. I showed this to 23 students to start discussion on what is acceptable? critical thinking skills. plagriarism. many thanks. ida
dear Dan. I showed this to 23 students to start discussion on what is acceptable? critical thinking skills. plagriarism. many thanks. ida
Neuroscience is now telling us that most decisions are made before ‘we’ become aware of them. So by extension, it’s the environment that makes our decisions more than the conscious ‘person’? I agree, scapegoating is narrow-minded. We blame the ‘person’ because any else is an existential abyss – ‘we’ relate to that which we can empathize for after-all. For the sake of our ego, I think we’ll always find a way to blame the ‘person’, the identity that isn’t actually in control. Unless of course, we delegate decision-making to computers and relinquish control of ourselves. Now there’s an idea to ponder.
So we can assign praise to Lance when he wins, but we shouldn’t assign shame to Lance when he cheats?
Even if Lance identity isn’t in control, does it matter? By holding the whole Lance accountable, whatever part of Lance is deciding is still held accountable.
This article has had 42 comments and I can’t believe no one spotted this. Lance Armstrong took EPO before he had cancer, not only afterwards, therefore point 2 ( “took this drug as a cancer patient it was probably easier to justify this later on”) is not valid. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lance_Armstrong#SCA_Promotions_case:_2005
Taylor is right. According to Tyler Hamilton and numerous other riders of US Postal Armstrong doped before and it has always been rumored that Lance’s cancer might be a direct result of doping.
And also it is not true that everybody doped or at least it is very unlikely. There were a couple of riders like Basson who
publicily denounced dopers and talked about the doping problem and Lance was the one who tried to rein them in by trying to humiliate guys like Basson and instructing his teammates to ride in a way that minimizes Basson’s chances to win anything. When riders of US Postal said they would take a little bit of doping Lance supposedly said that they were wimps and tried to get rid of them. Lance aggressively responded to all people who accused him of doping in the past and tried to bully them ( for example the Andrieus). So with all due respect and high regard for your other work, Mr. Ariely, I think you suffer from a little bit lack of knowledge here.
I’m pretty sure We have read this same form of declaration in other places, it needs to be more popular using the people.
Hmm is anyone else having problems with the pictures on this blog loading?
I’m trying to determine if its a problem on my end or if it’s the
blog. Any responses would be greatly appreciated.
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