Why We Hate Cheaters, Phonies and Photoshoppers

Everything is Photoshopped. Look at any professional photo, or generic Facebook party picture, and it’s been post-processed in some way. In most cases, that processing is no different than the various developing and editing tricks that existed when film still ruled. Other cases are, yeah, more egregious. In any case, the Internet is obsessed with catching Photoshops, like the time Apple got its products mixed up. In China, catching the government using Photoshop as a censorship tool has become a national pastime. People freak out so hard over finding ’shops that making fun of the people that make fun of the people who call everything fake has become some sort of metameme.

Catching Photoshopped images fits in with our broader obsession with catching cheaters. Whether it’s a matter of someone proving their perceptibility or the sick pleasure people get from wagging their finger at others, it would seem we’re hardwired to call out tricksters. But is that actually the case? Could our innate desire to point out Fergie’s digital boob-plumping be an evolutionarily-derived trait?

If the desire to catch cheaters is an evolved trait, cheating itself must first have been an a viable strategy. And it is. Nature is filled with cheaters, all of them trying to misrepresent and steal their way to more food and more mates than they’d ever have otherwise.

Cheating arises to exploit cooperative animal relationships. In coral reefs, there are groups of fish who feed by cleaning parasites from other fish, who we can think of as their clients. It’s a pretty straightforward, win-win scenario: When a client swims up to a cleaner, the client gets rid of energy-robbing parasites and the cleaner scores an easy meal. But every now and then one of those cleaners gets a bit greedy. Rather than just gnoshing on parasites, that cheater might also nibble on its client, maybe snagging a bite of scale or something else that would adversely affect the client. It’s an easy swindle for the cheater, but hurts everyone else, including other cleaner fish who now have to deal with more wary or more defensive clients.

Or think about mimicry. Poisonous butterflies tend to have bright, high-contrast colors. Rather than using camouflage, they’ve evolved to visually scream at predators "Hey! Don’t eat me, I’ll kill you!" But poison production is an energy-intensive enterprise, which partly means those butterflies need to spend more time eating, time that could theoretically be better spent trying to reproduce. Still, making poison is worth it if predators know to avoid eating you.

But it’s a situation ripe for exploitation. Many non-poisonous species have evolved to look like poisonous species so that they can take advantage of the threat. It’s a great situation for the fakers: they don’t have to go through the hassle of creating poison but they can still get predators to steer clear. For the real butterflies doing the work, it’s a horrible deal. Every time a predator eats a non-poisonous cheater (whether by accident, juvenile naïveté, or just hunger) and doesn’t die or barf, it dilutes the threatening power of that poisonous color scheme. Fakers mean that the real threat of poison is no longer as strong.

What’s an animal with real poisonous defenses to do? Nature offers a whole host of defense strategies. They basically fall into two main categories: those that make cheating impossible and those that make cheating a risky or painful proposition.

The first defense strategy ties into our previous discussion about luxury. The luxury world is heavily plagued by people trying to make knock-offs, which may help add to the desire for increasingly ostentatious displays of wealth. It’s how peacocks work: only a very healthy, very successful peacock can afford to grow those extravagant feathers, and the ladies know it. The same principle applies with a Bentley. Try as hard as you like, but you can’t copy it.

But what happens when copying or cheating becomes incredibly easy? Photoshop lowers the bar. In that case, the only defense option is to deal with cheaters by meting out some serious street justice. If the cleaner fish mentioned above take a bite out of their clients, the clients attack. If you’ve spent any time at all watching the show Cheaters, you know humans do the same thing.

In the ether of the Internet, engaging in a punch fight with someone who’s cheated you doesn’t work, so instead we shame. Anyone who’s thought of trying to pull some photo trickery online should know well the Internet’s ability to fight back with aggression. Reputations are questioned and bodies of work are scrutinized with the accusing eyes of the crowd. It all serves a purpose. The risks are now huge for anyone to tries to pull a fast one with their amazing ’Shop skills. Naturally: our distaste for cheaters is more than skin deep.

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