Cheating at school is a serious enough offence, and carries with it considerable repercussions, but a new study from California State University suggests that it may also give insight into the character of the individual that can influence how they are likely to behave throughout their career.

The research set out to explore whether cheating in the classroom naturally led on to cheating in the workplace, and what factors helped to shape this attitude.

The researchers surveyed a few hundred undergraduate students, to explore their views on cheating and ethics more generally, with each question gauging a range of agreement from strongly agree to strongly disagree.

Tolerance for cheating

The data showed that people who had a tolerance for cheating in the classroom were also more laissez faire about cheating in the workplace as well.  To try and get to the roofs of the issue, the team then mapped their findings to previous studies on cheating and ethics.

For instance, one such study into ethical decision making suggested that individualism and collectivism were key.  This led the researchers to try and map the personalities of the students they quizzed to see if those with more individualist or collectivist personalities were more likely to think cheating was ok.

Interestingly, it was the students with a more collectivist mindset that were more open minded about cheating, with their individualistic peers more critical of unethical behavior.  The researchers believe this could be becahse collectivists want to maintain group cohesion, and therefore don’t want to call out unethical behavior.

“To save face they might count on cheating to make sure they all do well. They also won’t rat each other out because that will make people look bad,” they explain.

Whilst the researchers accept that their findings are not conclusive, they hope that they will nonetheless help schools adopt a more culturally sensitive method of reducing unethical behavior in the classroom.

“As professors, we need to set the tone and say, ‘This is what’s not rewarded in the classroom’ and train students that following ethical behavior leads to better outcomes,” they say. “So when they graduate and work for companies they will better equipped to evaluate that situation.”