Personality, Attitude, and Demographic Correlates of Academic Dishonesty: A Meta-Analysis

Over a century of research has focused on the relationship between student characteristics and academic dishonesty. Here we conduct a meta-analysis of this extensive literature across three broad domains: personality, academic attitudes, and historical information including demographic and prior acc...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Psychological bulletin 2020-11, Vol.146 (11), p.1042-1058
Main Authors: Lee, Samuel D., Kuncel, Nathan R., Gau, Jacob
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Academic misconduct
Adult
Agreeableness
Antisocial personality disorder
Antisocial Personality Disorder - psychology
Attitude
Attitudes
Cheating
Conscientiousness
Deception
Demographic Characteristics
Demography
Dishonesty
Female
Five factor model
Human
Humans
Impulsive Behavior
Impulsivity
Integrity
Male
Meta-analysis
Morality
Morals
Neutralization
Personality
Psychopathy
Self Efficacy
Student Attitudes
Student Characteristics
Students - psychology
Systematic review
Values
Young Adult
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Over a century of research has focused on the relationship between student characteristics and academic dishonesty. Here we conduct a meta-analysis of this extensive literature across three broad domains: personality, academic attitudes, and historical information including demographic and prior accomplishments. After analyzing correlations from over 27,000 participants across 75 samples, several relationships stand out. Although measures of conscientiousness (ρ¯ = −.25) and agreeableness (ρ¯ = −.13) from the popular five-factor model demonstrate important relationships with dishonesty, equal or greater effects were found for specific personality scales including impulsivity (ρ¯ = .39) and psychopathy (ρ¯ = .40). Both morality (ρ¯ = −.24) and academic self-efficacy (ρ¯ = −.28) were related to less dishonest behavior but demonstrated substantially smaller effects than measures of neutralization (ρ¯ = .43), a tendency to justify and deflect immoral behavior as reasonable given the circumstances. Hypotheses were developed and results are framed by two competing models of academic dishonesty. Public Significance Statement This study examined how the personality, values, and demographic characteristics of students are related to engaging in academically dishonest behaviors during college. Many characteristics are related to academic dishonesty with the impulsivity, morality, and a tendency to justify inappropriate behavior as being understandable demonstrating the largest reliable effects.
ISSN:0033-2909
1939-1455
DOI:10.1037/bul0000300