The Status Cheats

Why do ordinary people engage in deceptive behavior to earn social clout?

Image Credit: Steven Lelham, Unsplash.

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition is free for everyone, but if you value my work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription for just $4/month. I rely on your generous support to make my writing sustainable.

---

I: Crossing the Line

On September 15, 2019, Emily, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, flew across the finish line at the PeaceHealth Appletree Half Marathon in Washington state.

She had not just completed the race, but finished second—an inspiring feat for someone who had built an online following by denouncing body shaming in athletic events. Visibly overweight, Emily’s surprising finish time of 1 hour and 26 minutes obliterated the pace of all but one of the top female athletes. It was a blistering 6:34 per mile, or 4:05 per kilometer, a clip that most serious amateur runners can’t even maintain for a 5k, let alone a half marathon.

Emily’s social media “brand” capitalized on these astonishing athletic performances. She “built her online presence, both professional and personal, on a platform of empowerment. She said women should take control of the stories about their bodies—not be defined by what others thought those bodies should look like or what they could do with them.”

Her digital inspiration on Instagram—where Emily listed her marathon personal best as being an elite 2 hours and 52 minutes—pushed her followers toward her therapy practice, where she offered healing for women with feelings of trauma about being held back by their weight. Emily’s running feats spoke for themselves, proof that such feelings were all just in your head.

Yet, at the half marathon finish line, when it became clear that Emily had finished second, several people were confused rather than inspired. The elite runners, who mostly stuck together at the front of the course during the race, hadn’t seen her. How had she overtaken all but one of them without anyone noticing? The runner who had been prepared to collect her third place medal was particularly peeved.

Perhaps most confused was the race director, Sherri McMillan, who explained her bewilderment to Willamette Week, after Emily excitedly told her about her second place finish:

“I was like, ‘That's amazing, but I'm so confused because I saw you on your bike!’” McMillan recalls. “And Emily was like, ‘No, that was my twin sister! If you look closer, she has more freckles.’”

Emily, it turns out, doesn’t have a twin sister. She isn’t a neuroscientist. She didn’t go to Harvard. She didn’t have a therapy license. And she can’t run six and a half minute miles—at least not without wheels.

Confronted with multiple witnesses who spotted her on a bike during the race, Emily finally confessed and issued a statement that strongly implied that this was far from the first time she had cheated in a race. But rather than taking full accountability for her actions, she instead took to Instagram, posting a photo of herself running with a caption that depicted herself as the victim of body-shaming injustice: “I've been disqualified from races because they ‘found it impossible to believe someone of my build could hold those times.’”

Three weeks later, a man named Derek Murphy noticed suspicious data coming in from Emily’s performance as she competed at the Chicago Marathon. In an early stage of the race, she was running a slow but steady 13 minutes per mile pace. Then, abruptly, she began going through checkpoints at just over 6 minutes per mile, putting her speed for that 5k not too far off the professional athletes in the field.

Murphy, a Cincinnati-based business analyst who runs a website called Marathon Investigation in his spare time, had made it his hobby to catch cheaters in running events. With Emily, he had caught a serial offender.

After her case received attention in the press, everything died down. It seemed Emily had disappeared. Until one day, when Derek—marathon sleuth—noticed an anomaly in a nearby race in Cincinnati. After a few quick mathematical calculations threw up huge red flags, he realized that the 3rd place finisher must have cheated. When he saw her race photos, he recognized the runner. She was going by a new name, but this was Emily.

I haven’t fully named Emily here because she’s not a public figure, not an elite runner cashing in on illegitimate sponsorship deals, not even someone who produced many victims aside from those she dishonestly ousted from the podium at local running races.¹ But she is part of a disturbingly fascinating class of people that I call The Status Cheats, individuals who engage in deceptive, dishonest, or corrupt behavior solely in pursuit of social recognition.

We rightly focus much of our attention on those who break the rules at the top— the corrupt kingpins, the crooked oligarchs, the profiteering presidents. But for a more relatable window into human social behavior, we need to look closer to ourselves: why are ordinary people like Emily going to extraordinary lengths to lie, cheat, and deceive even when there’s no financial gain or power to be had?

II: Extraordinary Lengths

Marathons offer a useful window into this question. That’s because marathon cheats can be broken into two categories. First, there are people who cheat at elite sports for more obvious reasons such as financial gain.

In the 1904 Olympics in St. Louis, the apparent marathon winner was ready to get his gold medal before it became apparent that he rode in a car for much of the course.² And in the 1980 Boston Marathon, the now-infamous Rosie Ruiz burst onto the course about a half mile from the finish line and appeared to win the sweltering race with suspiciously little sweat. These examples, outlandish as they are, fit into a more straightforwardly rational framework: it makes sense why someone would try to get a gold medal or a lucrative prize purse.

Rosie Ruiz, pretending to be exhausted, after not running a marathon.

The threat of such dishonesty provoked timing chips and checkpoints, to make it harder for devious runners to follow in Ruiz’s footsteps. Despite those deterrents, there is a second and surprisingly large group of people who cheat at running purely for social clout.³ For example, 11,000 runners in the 2023 Mexico City marathon were disqualified for cutting the course, vastly reducing the length they had to run.⁴ This is particularly strange, because most people in large marathons aren’t racing each other; they’re racing themselves against the clock. As a result, marathon courses usually overflow with camaraderie and kindness—the best of humanity.

But one accomplished runner—a dentist named “Kip”—profiled brilliantly in a 2012 New Yorker essay called “Marathon Man,” captured the ethos of The Status Cheats better than anyone else. That’s not only because of the bizarre lengths he went to while hunting social status through running prowess, but also because, unlike Ruiz, he was already an exceptional runner without deception. Why bother cheating when you’re already legitimately impressive?

Posting online, Kip wrote about his ambition to complete a marathon in all fifty states. And yet, as with many serial offenders, initial alarm bells began with some dubious race results. That caused a runner named Kyle Strode, the age category winner of one of the suspect races, to poke around Kip’s previous results to check for irregularities. He looked up Kip’s previous marathon finish times, saw the “West Wyoming Marathon” listed, and fired off an e-mail to its race director, Richard Rodriguez, to see if there were any irregularities involving Kip at that race, too.

Rodriguez wrote back two days later:

“Wow, that’s quite a scenario! It would have been very unlikely for the same thing to have happened at our race, as there were only 30 participants and the lead 2 runners ran almost the entire race together. I have not received any complaints. I will keep my ears open though. If there is an update, send it my way. Take care, Richard.”

This created doubt for Strode: maybe he was barking up the wrong tree. But as more results kept pouring in, and as The New Yorker reporter started poking around more, there was an unexpected revelation: the West Wyoming Marathon didn’t actually exist.

It turned out that Kip had not only invented the race, but had also fabricated 28 other athletes who didn’t exist to make it look real—and even went to the trouble of creating runner profiles for each of them on a running results website called Athlinks. As Mark Singer highlighted, these were:

“twenty-eight men and women, from twelve states, with tellingly unimaginative names ( Joseph Smith, Kevin Scott, Sue Johnson, Karen Nelson)…The next day, two more imaginary races, in Orlando and Atlanta, were identified among [Kip’s] Athlinks performances. Inspection of the race Web sites revealed that they were hosted by the same Internet server as the sites for the West Wyoming race, for Worldrecordrun, and for [Kip’s] dental practice.”

Then, the cherry on top: the race director who responded to the initial suspicions, Richard Rodriguez, didn’t exist either; it was Kip himself, answering a query about his own cheating at a marathon he invented, on a fake e-mail, hosted by a fake website, all to make it appear online that he completed a fast-paced marathon in Wyoming. The evidence was overwhelming, and not just from the fake marathon. There were photos showing him walking during marathons, wearing different clothes at the start and finish line, and more. Despite incontrovertible evidence, Kip never admitted what he had done.⁵

The Kip caper poses a puzzle: why do humans expend so much energy on seemingly pointless deception—and why is such behavior likely becoming more common over time?

III: From the Evolution of Cheating to Positional Goods

Cuttlefish do not run marathons, but they are masters of deceptive behavior in their ocean habitats. With unbelievable speed, they can change their appearance, camouflaging themselves impeccably. But they also use their instant two-tone color changes to trick their rivals.

When a male member of the mourning cuttlefish species attempts to seduce a female mate, he will use the chromatophores covering his unique skin to show off a mating color pattern—the cuttlefish equivalent of walking by someone at the bar wearing your best outfit. But there’s a risk: if another male is in the vicinity, and he struts his best mating skin color pattern, what if she fancies him more?

Evolution has provided an ingenious and rather devious solution. The courting male will place himself between the female and the male and then divide the coloration on his body in half, so that the female on his left will see his mating skin pattern, while the male on his right will see female color patterning. In other words, the left side of his body will appear to be a sexy, virile cuttlefish, while the right side of his body will look like a female. The entire point of this bizarre evolved behavior is to convince the rival male that he is not a sexual threat, but is rather a potential mate. The rival will either let his guard down, or waste his time.

The cuttlefish on the right has a split pattern down the middle as described above. Image: Macquarie University

Clearly, such biological “cheating” can confer evolutionary advantages for individuals. In nature, it doesn’t always pay to be honest.

Human societies, by contrast, tend to thrive when people cooperate—and do so honestly. The material well-being of a group of people is often directly proportional to the degree to which dishonest and deceptive behavior is deterred, while reliable, predictable cooperation is rewarded. This helps explain the social evolution of, say, legal contracts—in which everyone wins when there’s an enforcement mechanism to ensure that all participants play by the rules. There are both good reasons why deception has evolved—and good reasons why human society tries to stamp it out.

The Status Cheats are different. There’s not a straightforward evolutionary explanation. The marathoning dentist was trying to manage his social perception, not chase a mate or pad his bank account. So, to understand what makes these deceivers tick—and why they’re becoming more prevalent—you first need to understand positional goods. As I previously explained:

The economist Fred Hirsch used the term positional goods to refer to such items or social assets that are valued precisely because they are scarce, finite, and socially desirable.

On one end of the spectrum are the least positional goods—paperclips, for example—where they are cheap, exist in near unlimited abundance, and convey nothing about social position. On the other extreme are priceless, singular works of art, valued not just for their beauty, but for the elite uniqueness that confers socially constructed value. This is why, for example, Saudi Arabia’s murderous crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, paid $450 million to buy the famed Salvator Mundi painting before displaying it on his superyacht.

But the most prized positional goods are abstract: status, power, rank in the social hierarchy. These are, by definition, finite. If everyone is a CEO, then nobody is. If everyone is rich, nobody is.

What’s critically important about this concept is that it only becomes a dominant aspect of life when one’s basic material needs are already met. Social hierarchy has always mattered to humans, but it used to be more tightly coupled with actual material benefits. Hunters gained social status because they could provide food to the group. By contrast, the starving farmer cares little for social clout derived from blazing fast marathon times.

For most of human history, then, there were few people in society who had the luxury of caring about frivolous positional goods—the velvet-clad courtiers who fretted about palace etiquette while the masses scrounged for food.

Today, positional goods dominate the modern social lives of millions for three key reasons.

1. Most people in rich, developed democracies have sufficient material wealth that they are free to fixate on often meaningless questions of social rank.

2. That tendency is amplified because many people work in—and would readily acknowledge that they work in—what the late anthropologist David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” roles that they feel are relatively meaningless. If you sense that you’re but a tiny, purposeless cog in a sprawling corporate machine, chasing arbitrary positional goods becomes far more important to one’s sense of social wellbeing.

3. The scale of social comparison—in which we measure ourselves against others—has drastically expanded in the era of social media. Rather than comparing ourselves to those in our immediate local community, we now might be compared to literally billions of others.

On that final point, consider our vast realm of social comparison compared to our prehistoric ancestors:

If you were pretty good at hunting, there’s a good chance you’d be the best hunter anyone knew. Maybe someone two hundred miles away was better than you, but you were oblivious to their existence, so it didn’t matter to you or those around you.

Now, we’ve concocted a world where such exemplary social recognition is a pipe dream…There are still absolutes on the extremes of humanity. But the odds of being that best person are now one in eight billion.

---

The Perils of an Enormous Social World

---

These three facets of modern social life supercharge our gravitation toward a pointless positional goods arms race. The idea that one’s personal worth is proportionate to the speed at which they can run a long way is utterly bizarre. And yet, even within the case study of running, it’s not just the marathon cheats; there are now “Strava Mules” in major cities who are paid to perform exercise on behalf of others so that the client can receive dopamine-laden digital kudos on the fitness social media platform Strava. (Try explaining that to our hunter-gatherer ancestors).

IV: The Antidote

Academics have, unsurprisingly, come up with fresh jargon to describe dishonest online behavior in pursuit of social clout. They call it deceptive like-seeking, in which a person yearns for digital likes—even dishonestly—to validate their self-worth.

As you might expect, research shows that those most prone to becoming what I call Status Cheats fit into three categories: narcissists, those driven by conspicuous consumption or visible displays of status, and those who feel “weak peer belonging,” meaning that they’re searching for external validation out of a sense of social insecurity.

We have collectively engineered a modern social environment that, by design, replaces deep and meaningful connections with shallow ties that invite superficial, isolating digital comparisons. It’s no surprise that people often feel bad; doomscrolling is depressing, and you can’t just post your way out of that malaise. In that environment, deception for social clout becomes comprehensible.

But above all, these are crises not just of social media, but of a lack of meaning—in which the antidote to chasing fake external validation is finding inner purpose. After all, people who feel intrinsically valuable don’t feel an urge to invent marathons or pedal their way to a hollow sense of fabricated self-worth.

---

Thank you for reading The Garden of Forking Paths. This edition was free for everyone, but if you find my work interesting or thought-provoking, please consider upgrading for the low, low price of just $4/month. Alternatively, you could check out my new book: FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.

1. One runner exposed by Marathon Investigation—who received a deluge of online criticism after he refused to admit to cheating despite overwhelming evidence—took his own life. In these instances, I feel it’s kinder to not use full names so this essay doesn’t show up in search results for that person’s name, as she clearly has/had some form of mental wellbeing issues and is not a public figure.

2. Arguably the most interesting marathon in history, the organizers were trying to test a theory that water consumption damaged athletic performance, so they only had one water stop on the course even though it was 90°F (32°C). One of the runners was given a special drink that was somehow supposed to be performance-enhancing, but was just a mix of brandy and rat poison (he survived, barely). Another hadn’t eaten for forty hours after a bender in New Orleans, turned up dressed in street clothes for the event, and then got food poisoning during the race after he picked up and ate a rotten apple. One athlete was chased off the course by feral dogs.

Disastrous as it was, the legitimate gold medal winner clocked a time of 3:28:53 over 24 miles, meaning that my London Marathon time of 3:38:48 over 26.2 miles on Sunday—in which I unfortunately blew up in hot weather after mile 20 with muscle cramps—would have netted me the gold medal in 1904. (For perspective, I finished roughly 11,000th out of 56,000 runners).

3. Former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan also previously fibbed about his marathon time in 2012, claiming that he used to run marathons under 3 hours. (The truth was that he had completed one marathon in 4 hours and 1 minute, already an achievement worth celebrating without embellishment).

4. This was partly because of a collectible medal series, where each year’s medal corresponded to a letter in the word “Mexico,” and finishers would try to collect all six.

5. Kip died last month—and despite dubious running behavior was clearly not a villain.