Nobody claimed that americans never cheated, yet the blame of things getting worse is put on GP on those coming from “low trust” societies.

It’s a xenophobic lie, like if Americans don’t celebrate lying on positive euphemisms like “fake it till you make it” or “being a good salesman”

It may be xenophobic, but whether it's a lie is separate from that and it may or may not be. Unpalatable assertions can still be true.

For what it's worth, "fake it till you make it" is far from being universally seen as positive, and (car) salesmen are seen as one of the most untrustworthy and least liked professions (just above telemarketers and members of congress). [1]

1: https://thehill.com/business/3812900-here-are-the-most-and-l...

Do you have an alternative explanation? Or is your stance that it just couldn't possibly be immigrants?

Maybe academic cheating is related to people pursuing a degree more like a passport to riches than a vocational pursuit.

I mean, the whole reason why people also lie in other areas. Which also explains why people of “low trust” societies might lie more rather than “it’s in the culture of those dirty foreigners”.

> if Americans don’t celebrate lying on positive euphemisms like “fake it till you make it” or “being a good salesman”

Most Americans that I know don't consider those phrases to reflect positive values at all. They're used disparagingly against people who really think like that.

Either you live in some bubble or you're just lying lol.

Well, we all live in bubbles, don't we? That's why it's interesting to have a glimpse into other people's bubbles, and be reminded that our own experiences are often not representative of the whole.

Ya true, just some bubbles are smaller than others.

Fwiw I've usually seen "fake it till you make it" in 2 contexts: 1. Disciplines in which skill development requires overreaching beyond one's current skill level eg musical improvisation 2. In reference to confidence eg many software developers experience imposter syndrome and have to pretend to be more confident than they actually are in order to be taken seriously, even if they are the most skilled in the room

Similar experiences have been reported by people who came from these places

I guess “trust” was at an all time high when there were literally laws against Black people being in the same section as White people, sundown towns in the south and laws against black people marrying white people?

Not every facet of society is related to racism. Saying I prefer the days of a single income being enough to survive on doesn't mean I wish black's and women had less rights. It's an orthogonal point. Wages are gone because manufacturing moved overseas in the same time period, etc...

Those were the same days…

I assure you that “the good old days” weren’t so good for my still living parents growing up in the segregated south.

As far as “not everything being related to race”, tell that to my parents who grew up in the 60s and 70s when everything was related to their race.

They literally weren’t “trusted” to drink out of the same water fountain, go to the same schools or swim in the same pool.

Different issues, unrelated

We are talking about “trust” receding in society. The majority didn’t “trust” the minority enough to even allow them to be a part of society. It’s only a different issue to you because your parents can wax poetically about the “good old days”

Are you implying trying to increase societal trust would increase racism? You aren't making an obvious point. Trust and racism are inverses?

I’m not implying anything. I’m stating very explicitly that people who say trust is lower now than sone mythical time in the past is the same time period when the US has laws explicitly targeting “others” because they didn’t trust Black people (Jim Crow laws, laws against miscegenation, redlining), Japanese (internment camps), etc.

The only people who long for “the good old days” when “trust” was high are those who benefited themselves or whose parents benefited from systematic and de jure discrimination.

The good old days when you could live off of one income came about because Europe was recovering from a war and we dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan.

I wonder if Americans' history of seeing cheating as dishonorable grew from our roots in Puritanism, where principle always trumps pragmatism. If so, then perhaps our ongoing devaluation of principles (and our rising mistrust in others to act honorably) is caused by the erosion of those roots as the American middle class has fallen on harder times, concluding that "the rules of the game have changed" and the old mantra of guiding one's life by principle is now delivering diminishing returns. So when in Rome...

It's not Puritanism, but Judaeo-Christianity. In the Bible, God is always described as telling the truth, so any form of misrepresentation is moving yourself towards the opposite of God's character. Cheating is basically a form of misrepresenting yourself; commandment #9 prohibits false testimony about your neighbor, which presumably also includes false testimony about yourself. The New Testament also prohibits lying, as does the Talmud. In fact, the New Testament describes Satan as the father of lies, which presumably reflected Jewish traditions at the time. Imitating the devil would hardly be honorable for either Jews or Christians, and Paul even explicitly says we are to imitate Christ. (Since Paul was a rabbi applying the current Jewish thinking in the context of discovering that Messiah = Christ = God, presumably the Jewish thinking was that we should imitate God)

The Old Testament also offers an approach to dealing with rampant cheating in society: trust in God to provide you with what you need. It's not an exact match for classmates cheating, but David had to deal with a literal existential crisis by a king who believed falsehoods about him, and dealt with it by trusting God and refusing to kill the king (that is, using the king's methods to secure himself). Many of the psalms appear to record the emotional process he went through.

It also says invade a country and kill all of the men, women and children and take their land…

https://www.bible.com/bible/1359/1SA.15.3-23.ICB

Even with David, when David sent one of his soldiers to die on the front line so he could have the soldier’s wife, God let David’s baby die.

The Old Testament God wasn’t exactly the loving and forgive your neighbor type.

Does this correlate with the increase in polarization? I know Jonathan Haidt has spoken about his research on the increase in polarization is America.

If that correlation exists, it may point to an alternative hypothesis to the GP claim that the issue is rooted in those coming from "low trust" societies and due to an internal mechanism.

This gets back to my other statement where people seem to ignore Jim Crow laws and the segregated south. How much more “polarized” can people be than literally being forced by law to do everything separately?

So you’re saying we are less polarized? How do you square that with Haidts research?

He completely ignored Jim Crow laws and segregation where one side wanted to be treated as equals and the other side wanted to keep them segregated ?

By definition, being forced to drink out of separate water fountains is putting people on the opposite side - ie opposite poles.

His analysis was within the context of social media driving polarization, so why would you expect it to look at the Jim Crow era? It seems like you’re starting with a conclusion and working backwards.