cheating

1. influencing one’s own or others’ outcomes by deceit, trickery, or other unfair maneuvers. Because cheating is disruptive to maintaining a variety of social relationships, human beings and other animals have developed strategies to detect and punish it.

2. in evolutionary psychology, using asocial strategies to gain an evolutionary advantage. For example, males of some species who have formed an exclusive pair bond with a female may nonetheless seek to mate with other females so as to increase their chances of producing offspring.

3. in reciprocal altruism, the failure of an individual to aid another individual who has provided assistance in the past.

4. see infidelity. —cheat vb., n.

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Psychology term of the day

February 22nd 2025

emergent feature

an entity produced by the interaction of small or simple elements (e.g., short line segments) in the visual system, such an entity (e.g., a polygon) being more salient to human perception than are the elements themselves. In ergonomics, object displays are usually designed to make use of emergent features; the display configurations yield an overall image (e.g., a rectangle or pentagon) that can be perceived holistically by the operator of a machine system and therefore rapidly analyzed to assess the state of the system. When a component of the system is not in the appropriate or normal state, the image will be distorted, alerting the operator to potential problems.