Educational psychologist examines factors that lead students to cheat

Nine out of 10 high school students say they have cheated on homework assignments. Two out of three have reported cheating on a test. Seven out of 10 college students have engaged in some form of academic misconduct – from test cheating to plagiarism.

Yet most students think cheating is wrong.

“That’s what fascinates me,” says Jason Stephens, an assistant professor of educational psychology whose research focuses on academic dishonesty.

“The fact that people make moral judgments about something they should or should not do, and then act in ways that are inconsistent with that judgment. I call this phenomenon belief-behavior incongruity.”

Stephens’ research examines the psychological, situational, and social contextual factors that affect students’ decisions to cheat and lead to belief-behavior incongruity.

“I’ve looked at the role of moral reasoning, moral identity, and moral disengagement, and how that plays on students’ decisions to break the rules, their perceptions of peer norms related to cheating, and their perceptions of their teachers and the kinds of learning environments they have created.”

Over the years, his research has involved thousands of high school and college students who have participated in surveys, focus groups, and individual interviews.

The strongest predictor of cheating in Stephens’ research is moral disengagement, or the extent to which a student tends to disengage or neutralize personal responsibility for his or her behavior by displacing onto others. Teachers and aspects of the peer culture are the strongest targets of this diffusing of responsibility, he says.

“When we’ve done something we believe to be wrong, we want to resolve the dissonance and protect our ego or sense of self as a good person,” he says.

“Disengagement mechanisms, such as displacement of responsibility, serve such ego defense needs. So in the case of academic dishonesty, students do this by blaming their teachers for being poor teachers or creating unfair tests. Students also diffuse responsibility by rationalizations such as, ‘everyone else is doing it.’”

Not surprisingly, this tendency to disengage moral control is less likely among students with strong moral identities, Stephens says.

“What seems to matter is the extent to which they feel they are a moral person. The more you possess a moral sense of self, the more you demand self-consistency between your beliefs and behaviors, the less likely you are to cheat.”

Stephens says several academic factors put students at risk for cheating. One is the extent to which someone is oriented toward mastery.

“Students who have a mastery goal orientation are interested in developing their competence,” he says.

“The extent that you’re in it to learn and you love learning, the less likely you are to cheat.”

If, however, a student is performance goal-oriented, he or she will be more likely to cheat, according to Stephens.