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Can Priming Legal Consequences and the Concept of Honesty Decrease Cheating During Examinations?

ABSTRACT: Cheating on exams is a very common phenomenon that causes great harm. Various measures, such as chastisement and direct punishment, have been employed to reduce cheating. Previous studies have found that increasing punishment and activating "self-concept maintenance" can reduce this behavior. This study employed a priming paradigm to investigate whether priming legal consequences and the concept of honesty would reduce cheating in examination situations. In experiment 1, a total of 402 freshmen from 17 classes were included in this study. The 185 students in experimental condition were primed for legal consequences. The cheating behaviors and employed analysts were defined to count the number of cheaters. The results show that the number of students cheating in the primed group did not decrease compared to those in the controlled condition. In experiment 2, a total of 386 freshmen from 16 classes participated in this experiment. The 171 students in experimental condition were primed for the concept of honesty. The results also show that the number of students cheating in the primed group did not decrease. This study shows that priming legal consequence and the concept of honesty were not significant in certain situations, such as during examinations. It is suggested that some psychological manipulations in decreasing dishonesty behaviors should be further tested in ecological situations.

SUBMITTER: Wu YW

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6985441 | biostudies-literature | 2019

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Can Priming Legal Consequences and the Concept of Honesty Decrease Cheating During Examinations?

Wu Yu-Wei YW Zhong Lu-Lu LL Ruan Qian-Nan QN Liang Jing J Yan Wen-Jing WJ

Frontiers in psychology 20200121

Cheating on exams is a very common phenomenon that causes great harm. Various measures, such as chastisement and direct punishment, have been employed to reduce cheating. Previous studies have found that increasing punishment and activating "self-concept maintenance" can reduce this behavior. This study employed a priming paradigm to investigate whether priming legal consequences and the concept of honesty would reduce cheating in examination situations. In experiment 1, a total of 402 freshmen ...[more]

PMID: 32038348

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Project description:BackgroundThe reliability of signals is a key issue in the study of animal communication. Both empirical work and theoretical models show that communication need not be entirely honest, and thus signals can be deceitful. Aggressive communication appears to be a prime candidate for such deceitful communication, because bluffing has been described in several species. Bluffing in these situations are supposed to be maintained by frequency dependent selection where the fitness of a given type depends on the frequencies of the other types in the population. Previous efforts to model such a scenario through individual based simulations have yielded conflicting results. Studies have either found a rich set of polymorphic strategies including the traditional cheating scenario or found none. Thus, the modelling assumptions responsible for these diverging conclusions remain unclear.ResultsIn this study, I investigate the effects of four modelling assumptions: the role of an extended strategy set, the initial population composition (seeding), the differences in pay-offs and finally different parameter spaces. I investigate the effects of these factors on the evolvability of both honest and mixed cheating strategies. I show that both honest and cheating equilibria readily evolve and that the investigated parameter range and the seeding of the starting populations have the greatest influence on the outcome.ConclusionsBoth honest signalling and polymorphic cheating equilibria are more likely to evolve from a narrow strategy set than from a random mixture of strategies. A large potential strategy set is not a setback for the evolution of communication -honest or cheating- as long as the initial population is seeded with only a few strategies. In addition, different sections of the parameter space show consistently different behaviour. Thus, frequency dependent selection has the potential to explain various empirical observations that show consistent differences in aggressive behaviour.

Dataset Information

Can Priming Legal Consequences and the Concept of Honesty Decrease Cheating During Examinations?

Publications

Can Priming Legal Consequences and the Concept of Honesty Decrease Cheating During Examinations?

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