Last year, a promising female professional golfer in Korea received a three-year suspension for immoral behavior. During a round, anyone can inadvertently break the rules. However, it is a serious problem that she tried to cheat and move on without knowing the facts. Coincidentally, at the same time, a player caught using a similar trick in men’s golf came out and received a 5-year suspension and a fine of 50 million won.
I would like to believe that this has nothing to do with me, but more weekend golfers than I thought are not free from the problem of breaking the rules and lying. Is my golf morality okay? Professor Daniel Sakau, a sports psychologist at Minnesota State University in the U.S., developed a test to determine one’s golf morality by measuring how well a person abides by the rules of golf in various tempting situations during a round.
Here are just a few of them: If you answered ‘yes’ to less than one of the measures, then you are a very conscientious golfer. However, if you have 3 or more, your golf morality is at a very serious level and you need to look back on your golf life once. The full golf morality check can be found on my blog (blog.naver.com/chweh1).
1. Your caddy misunderstands and writes down your score less than the actual number of strokes, but just ignores it and goes to the next hole.
2. I hit the ball in the rough, but I didn’t touch the ball at all, so the position is the same. Since no one has seen it, it is not counted as one stroke, and it is regarded as a practice swing.
3. When you try to hit a ball that has landed on the fairway, the ball is covered in mud. I thought it would have an impact if I shot as it is, so I brushed off the dirt and shot.
4. I sent the ball to the middle of the fairway with a nice tee shot and when I went there, I found myself in a divot mark someone had dug. It’s the golfer’s fault for not repairing the divot, not mine.
5. I accidentally touched the sand with my club head while addressing for a bunker shot. It’s in the bunker, so of course only you know this, and you’d rather just ignore it than get a two-stroke penalty.
According to the results of a study conducted by Professor Sakau on golfers, the percentage of people who broke the rules was much higher in situations where there was room for thought to be ambiguous or unfair. Perhaps it’s because it’s easier to justify myself by saying I’m not to blame for the remorse or cognitive dissonance caused by breaking the rules. 안전놀이터
Most of those who have experienced breaking the rules said that they would break the rules as well as themselves in the same situation. Everyone else is breaking it, so what’s the big deal when I’m breaking it? In psychology, this is called the false consensus effect, and it refers to the psychology of projecting one’s opinion onto others and believing that they must have similar thoughts to one’s own.
Of course, in life, there are times when we are forced to break the rules or find it difficult to keep them unwillingly. However, if you keep piling up these little lies that deceive others as well as yourself, eventually you will become insensitive to lies to the point where you won’t even blink an eye at most lies.
Is that why? Disguised transfer, tax evasion, real estate speculation, and evasion of military service have long been the four major specifications of high-ranking officials, but there are plenty of excuses saying that it was an unavoidable situation, and few people honestly admit their faults.
According to research by scientists, we are exposed to an average of over 200 lies a day. Of course, many of these are white lies, but excluding sleeping time, we tell or hear each other’s lies 12 times an hour. I hope the magic of Pinocchio that I read when I was young, ‘If you lie, your nose gets longer’, is true.
Kookmin University Graduate School of Golf Science and Industry Professor , Doctor of