One of the posters presented at the APA Convention is generating a lot of buzz. Julie Hupp and Heidi Wallace at Ohio State–Newark reported a new twist on cheating by taking a look at students who DON’T cheat.
Fifty to 80 percent of college students admit to cheating.
Now here at chez Freberg, cheating is simply a non-issue. Honesty has always been a core value for us. When Kristin was a little girl, Mr. F (with his unique sense of humor) told her that her nose would turn purple if she told a lie. Subsequently, whenever she was tempted to tell her Dad a fib, she would walk up to him with her hand covering her nose. Interestingly, at the same APA conference, Gail Goodman of UC Davis pointed out that adults do a much better job at determining if a child is telling the truth when the child is making something up than when they’re denying an actual event. So when our children tell us they didn’t take the last cookie, we’re going to believe them more than if they tell us they saw their sister take it.
At any rate, Kristin moved very comfortably into the culture of West Point, where cadets agree to the famous honor code: “A cadet will not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The cadets do not lock their room doors, in spite of the computers and other equipment that college students own. I can imagine that some young people, even relatively successful, prosocial ones, would find living up to that code a challenge. But for us, this is a very natural approach to social life.
Karen was not without her honesty challenges as well. Competing at elite levels of track and field, she witnessed all the mess of drug cheating first hand. We won’t be going into all the gory details, because it might spoil your enjoyment of the Olympics, but needless to say, what shows up in the BALCO news is only the tip of the iceberg. It would have been very easy for Karen to go along, but she competed clean. As her parents, we are proud of her honesty and grateful for the health benefits she will enjoy from her decision.
As a student, I wanted to succeed as much as anybody, but the concept of cheating simply didn’t exist. I knew other people did, and in fact, I didn’t much care. One of my classmates in high school Latin routinely complained that the way I wrote during a test prevented him from seeing my answers clearly. I actually felt sorry for him, and tried to accommodate. I have always figured that cheating only hurts the cheater, and that learning material is its own reward. If I cheated during my neuroanatomy course with Arnold Scheibel or while studying with Robert Rescorla, wouldn’t that be missing a terrific opportunity?
Apparently, according to Hupp and Wallace, we are a minority. A whopping 50 to 80 percent of college students admit to having cheated. Wow–you really want these ding-dongs as your future surgeons and airline pilots and stockbrokers, don’t you?
So what separates the cheaters from people like us? Not too surprisingly, non-cheaters score high in honesty. Okay, that makes sense. But in addition, non-cheaters score high in empathy and courage, and have a more positive view of others.
To me, cheating is just another example of people choosing short-term over long-term gains. A lot of the time, it is totally misguided. If students put the time and effort they spend on elaborate cheating schemes into simply learning the material, they wouldn’t feel the need to cheat at all. Plus, there’s this little thing called looking in the mirror and seeing what kind of person you are. What we call “character” doesn’t happen overnight. It’s built one brick, one decision at a time.
