Why do students cheat even when they know it's wrong?
Students are less likely to cheat when they view it as a moral issue, but this relationship depends on whether they take personal responsibility and avoid making excuses for their behavior.
Source
Bridging the Divide: The Role of Motivation and Self-Regulation in Explaining the Judgment-Action Gap Related to Academic Dishonesty
What they did
The researcher surveyed 380 high school students from a private school in the northeastern United States. Participants completed questionnaires measuring whether they viewed academic dishonesty as a personal choice, social rule violation, or moral issue. They also reported their sense of personal responsibility, their tendency to rationalize cheating, and how often they cheated during the school year.
What they found
The study found that students who judged cheating as morally wrong reported the lowest rates of cheating, while those who saw it as a personal choice reported the highest. Furthermore, moral judgment did not directly stop students from cheating. Instead, moral judgment and personal responsibility worked together to reduce a student's tendency to make excuses for dishonest behavior, which directly predicted actual cheating rates and explained a portion of the variance with an R-squared value of 0.28.
The limits
What it doesn't show
First, because this study used a cross-sectional design, it cannot prove that moral beliefs actually cause changes in cheating behavior over time. Second, the data relied entirely on self-reports, which may be biased by students wanting to present themselves in a favorable light. Finally, the findings are limited because the participants were recruited from a single, highly selective private high school in the northeastern United States, meaning these patterns might not apply to students in other types of schools.
Key terms
- judgment-action gap
- The discrepancy between what an individual believes is the morally correct action and how they actually behave in real-world situations.
- social domain theory
- A developmental framework proposing that social reasoning is divided into distinct domains of knowledge: moral, conventional, and personal.
- moral disengagement
- A cognitive process through which an individual self-justifies or excuses harmful or dishonest behavior to avoid feeling guilty.
- responsibility judgments
- An individual's personal assessment of their obligation to act in accordance with their moral principles.
- deontic choices
- First-order moral judgments regarding what is inherently right or just to do in a given dilemma.
- common method variance
- A systematic error or bias in data that occurs when both the independent and dependent variables are measured using the same self-report instrument.
Flashcards
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Quiz yourself
What terms do philosophers and psychologists use respectively to describe the divide between moral belief and moral behavior?
Common questions
Do students actually consider cheating to be a moral issue?
Yes, for most types of cheating (like exam copying), the majority of students surveyed viewed it as morally wrong rather than just a violation of school rules. However, they tended to view collaboration without permission and plagiarism more as social rule violations.
Does simply knowing that cheating is wrong prevent students from doing it?
No, the study showed that moral judgment does not have a direct impact on behavior. Knowing cheating is wrong only translates to honest behavior if students also feel personally responsible and do not make excuses to justify dishonest acts.
What are some examples of 'excuses' or moral disengagement students use?
Students often deflect responsibility by blaming bad teachers, claiming that they are just trying to help a friend, or pointing out that other classmates started cheating first.
How can schools use these findings to reduce cheating?
Rather than just reminding students of rules, schools should foster open discussions about the moral values underlying integrity and help students build the personal responsibility needed to resist rationalizing dishonest choices.
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