Refugees Are r-strategists – Cheaters And Free Resources

Five times as many refugees cheat as Americans:

Foreign students are caught cheating an average of five times more often as their domestic classmates in the United States, a study has revealed.

Analysis by the Wall Street Journal found 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students, compared to just one domestic student.

However in some schools, there were up to eight times as many foreign students punished for the dishonest behavior.

Cheating is the search for free resources, in the form of grades. Notice that American universities are fairly r-selected to begin with. And the foreigners who travel to a new location (likely with high novelty seeking traits) beat the Americans there five times over.

I am naturally a competitive psychology. Yet I can remembering puzzling at my inability to cheat on a test when I was in college. I knew degrees weren’t about skill in the discipline, so much as how much raw data you could remember. I knew the courses were designed to minimize the amount of work the professor had to invest. I knew other kids were cheating. I knew it would be easy to cheat. But I never could do it, and I remember thinking it stupid at the time. For some reason I need that hard, challenging path. The cheaters don’t, and would be even more puzzled by a non-cheater’s adherence to rules than I was.

Sweden is seeing it in their economy:

Sweden’s state-funded broadcaster has revealed that of 163,000 migrants who came to Sweden, less than 500 have found jobs. Sweden saw a record 163,000 applications for asylum last year as a result of the migrant crisis and many Swedes were assured that the new arrivals would contribute to the economy; but new research from Sweden’s state-owned SVT reveals that fewer than 500 migrants have found work.

These are deeply encoded psychologies, revolving around tolerance for hardship, need for dopamine, and the moral/ethical balance which results from those respective levels. As you head to r, the need for free resources overwhelms all, and the result is crime, victimization, welfare reliance, sexual assault/victimization, and an envious sense of being in the out-group.

Part of this is why I won’t feel bad if the Apocalypse hits the US hard. The harder it is, the more likely these r-strategist psychologies will flee to greener pastures elsewhere, or at least more familiar pastures back in their homelands.

One advantage in the US may be our inherent violence. If the resource situation is as bad as it could get, the violence may be worse, and few if any of these characters will hang around for that.