“Can I Copy Your Answers?” Second-Party Cheating and How Social Goals and Collaborative Norms Matter (Poster 15)

• In Event: Thursday Poster Session 9:00 am
  In Poster Session: Motivational Beliefs, Context, and Consequences

Abstract

Academic dishonesty threatens the integrity of performance assessment, making it crucial to understand its various types and predictors. Among these, second-party cheating, which refers to aiding and abetting cheating behaviors, is similarly prevalent as individualistic cheating, yet has received limited research attention. We follow up on this and examine social goals and cooperative norms as predictors in a preregistered, longitudinal, Germany-wide study with 856 students. Structural equation models confirmed that both social goals and cooperative norms positively predicted second-party cheating, without evidence for an interaction. Further, second-party cheating was only weakly linked to individualistic cheating behaviors and, in contrast to it, was not significantly predicted by academic mastery and performance goals, speaking to different motivational mechanisms at play.

Authors

• Martin Daumiller, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

• Tanja Fritz, University of Augsburg

• Hernan González Cruz, University of Mannheim

• Selma Carolin Rudert, University of Basel

• Stefan Janke, University of Mannheim