Cheating is common in early childhood. However, limited empirical studies have explored the mechanism underlying the role of parenting in children's cheating. This study (N = 479 Singaporean families; 219 female children; 55% Chinese, 27% Malay, 18% Indian; data collected between July 2014 and April 2017) examined whether and how authoritarian parenting at 4.5 years predicted children's cheating 1.5 years later. When children were 4.5 years old, their self-criticism was assessed through the Etch-a-Sketch task, and mothers reported on both parents' authoritarian parenting. At age 6, cheating was assessed using the Dart Game. Results showed that paternal authoritarian parenting predicted a higher likelihood of cheating, mediated by children's self-criticism. Our findings can provide insights into promoting honesty within family environments. Cheating is common among young children, but we don’t fully understand how parenting influences it. In this study, we followed 479 children in Singapore to see whether strict and controlling parenting affected cheating over time. When the children were 4.5 years old, we measured parents' authoritarian parenting styles and observed how self-critical the children were during a parent-child interaction game. About 1.5 years later, we assessed cheating using a Dart Game. We found that when fathers were stricter and controlling, children became more self-critical, which made them more likely to cheat. This suggests that parenting affects how children perceive themselves, and cheating may serve as a coping strategy.
Academic dishonesty remains a persistent challenge in higher education, highlighting the need for scalable and cost-effective interventions that target internal motivation. Building on mindset theory, the present research tests the impact of a brief growth-mindset intervention on exam cheating and examines the mindset meaning system as a hypothesized mechanism. Growth mindset refers to beliefs about the malleability of one's abilities, whereas the mindset meaning system refers to the broader system of meanings organized by individuals' mindsets, shaping how they interpret effort, performance, and failure in achievement contexts. Study 1 employed a randomized controlled trial (N = 120) to evaluate the effect of a single-session growth mindset intervention on cheating behavior during a subsequent test. Study 2 used a cross-sectional survey (N = 475) to assess whether the growth mindset indirectly relates to cheating through the mindset meaning system. Results from Study 1 showed that the intervention significantly enhanced growth mindset levels and reduced cheating behavior compared to the control group. In Study 2, analysis of indirect effects revealed that growth mindset was not directly associated with cheating but had an indirect effect via the mindset meaning system. These findings suggest that promoting a growth mindset may serve as a promising strategy for reducing academic cheating.
Concerns regarding academic dishonesty are a persistent problem in higher education, including health professions and pharmacy education. Students may respond to academic pressures and new policy or procedure restrictions with innovative ways to gain an unfair advantage through technological advances and old-school methods. Recent shifts to online and hybrid modalities, as well as advances in artificial intelligence, smartphones, watches, and other technologies, continue to escalate the arms race between educational programs and those seeking to circumvent the system. This manuscript seeks to remind faculty and administrators of common cheating modalities that students may use (including high- and low-technology approaches) while calling on members of the Academy to refrain from merely discussing academic integrity issues but rather to actively seek to minimize and address these concerns. This requires increased awareness of various types of cheating and academic integrity matters, understanding of cheating approaches, intentional reflection on academic integrity policies, and implementation of related risk-reduction strategies. It is our responsibility as educators to prevent and address developing complications and be aware of advances in our field. One of the best ways to address advancing concerns of cheating, plagiarism, and academic integrity is by informing ourselves of recent developments relative to academic integrity, as well as peer-reviewed testing strategies to reduce cheating and other types of academic integrity issues.
The subclinical personality traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and everyday sadism (i.e., the Dark Triad/Tetrad) have been linked to a range of antisocial and deceptive behaviours. With increasing concern about integrity in higher education, it is important to understand how these traits relate to academic misconduct with AI-assisted misconduct becoming more commonplace. This systematic review and narrative synthesis examined evidence from 23 studies that investigated associations between dark traits and dishonest academic practices, including plagiarism, exam cheating, contract cheating, academic dishonesty, and AI-assisted cheating. Psychopathy showed the most consistent pattern of associations across misconduct behaviours. Machiavellianism was associated with some forms of dishonesty, such as plagiarism and cheating, but was not consistently associated with contract cheating. Narcissism showed weaker and more context-dependent associations. Everyday sadism was examined in comparatively few studies. Preliminary evidence linked sadism to some forms of academic dishonesty, including lying in academic contexts and AI assisted misconduct, but the small evidence base means that conclusions about its contribution to the Dark Tetrad framework remain tentative. Further research is needed before stronger conclusions can be drawn about sadism's role in academic misconduct. Future directions and implications, including suggestions for replication and expansion, are discussed.
We provide a conceptual framework and empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that within-individual and independent variation in floral reward and signal traits represents a continuous, variable cheating strategy. We propose that within-individual variation can reduce the ability of pollinators to punish cheaters and allow plants to save resources, thus acting as an effective mechanism of pollinator manipulation. We present a frequency-dependent model, simulations and analytical determination of equilibria complemented with two empirical cases supporting the hypothesis. Analyses showed that variable strategists are more likely to persist and coexist with cheater plants than with those that offer a predictable amount of reward (honest plants). Despite evidence of pollinator-mediated selection for floral honesty, honesty was not related to the total allocation of reward and dishonest (variable) plants are common in natural populations. Pollinator-mediated frequency-dependent selection can drive the evolution of more effective cheating strategies. Results suggest that honesty is not evolutionarily stable and can be replaced by populations composed of variable and cheater strategists, supporting the idea that within-individual variation in floral rewards and signals, as well as their association, may represent an underrecognized source of variation that can promote the evolution of stable cheating strategies in plant-pollinator interactions. This article is part of the theme issue 'Exploring negative frequency dependent selection across levels: from genetics to ecology and back again'.
Drawing upon moral disengagement theory, this study investigates the cognitive mechanisms and boundary conditions underlying how and when ambient coworker incivility spills over into workplace cheating behavior (WCB). Specifically, we offer a nuanced perspective on ethical leadership by examining its unintended amplifying effect in uncivil work environments. Utilizing a three-wave, time-lagged field survey with one-month intervals, we collected data from 252 full-time employees. We estimated a moderated mediation model using path analysis and bias-corrected bootstrapping to examine how ethical leadership conditionally shapes the indirect effect of coworker incivility on WCB via moral disengagement. Results reveal that employee moral disengagement serves as a cognitive mechanism mediating the positive relationship between coworker incivility and subsequent cheating behavior. High ethical leadership amplifies the positive relationship between coworker incivility and moral disengagement. Consequently, the positive indirect effect of coworker incivility on WCB via moral disengagement is significantly stronger when ethical leadership is high rather than low. This study provides evidence that coworker incivility translates into workplace cheating by deactivating employees' ethical self-regulation. Importantly, it highlights an unintended consequence of ethical leadership: when leaders espouse stringent moral standards but peer incivility remains unchecked, the stark contrast between normative expectations and interpersonal reality equips employees with potent cognitive justifications to morally disengage, thereby exacerbating ethical erosion.
Detecting cheating in classroom examinations is challenging because suspicious behaviors are often subtle, temporally sparse, and context-dependent. To address the lack of dedicated benchmarks for this setting, we introduce Cheatomaly, a curated video dataset assembled from publicly available classroom examination material and annotated to support weakly supervised anomaly detection. We formulate cheating detection as a weakly supervised video anomaly ranking task using Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) with Vision Transformer features. Videos are divided into temporal segments, and segment-level representations are built using mean pooling and a Mean, Standard Deviation, and Temporal Difference (MSD) formulation. A margin-based ranking objective is used to prioritize anomalous videos and suspicious temporal segments using only video-level labels during training. Experimental results on Cheatomaly show strong video-level discrimination and meaningful frame-level localization across repeated runs. Ablation, baseline, statistical, and sensitivity analyses indicate that temporal aggregation affects the trade-off between ranking and localization but does not produce consistent statistically significant gains. Overall, Cheatomaly provides a realistic benchmark for studying subtle cheating-related anomalies in classroom examinations, and the results highlight that the main challenge lies in modeling context-dependent temporal behavior rather than feature aggregation alone.
This research examines whether physical actions and moral decision making are causally linked. Across five preregistered studies involving 330 preschoolers (Mage = 5.96 years; 166 boys and 164 girls; middle-class Han Chinese), we investigated how distinct types of physical actions influence honesty and cheating behavior. Our findings revealed that children were consistently more honest when they performed an action on the environment (e.g., pulling down a screen on a box) than when they performed the same action on themselves (e.g., pulling down a blindfold they wore on their face). These results establish a robust causal link between physical actions and morality, demonstrating that the direction of action, that is, whether they are oriented toward the external environment or oneself, can significantly impact honesty. They challenge the traditional view that moral decisions are purely cognitive and disembodied processes. Instead, they emphasize the embodied nature of morality, where physical actions play a crucial role in shaping ethical choices from an early age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
A popular saying asserts that love is blind and lovers view each other through rose-tinted glasses. We examined whether lovers recognize their partners' flaws and whether reflecting on these imperfections affects love intensity. We recruited 844 partnered individuals and randomly assigned them to a flaw recognition condition, where they described their partner's shortcomings, or to a passive control condition without such additional tasks. Frequentist comparisons revealed no significant group differences in experiences of intimacy, passion, and commitment, and Bayesian tests provided strong evidence supporting the null hypothesis. However, qualitative analyses showed that participants who reported severe transgressions, particularly infidelity or aggression, reported significantly lower love intensity. These results indicate that although lovers-even in early relationship stages often presumed to be wearing rose-tinted glasses-can typically acknowledge their partners' imperfections without their feelings weakening, love may be undermined once transgressions exceed a critical threshold. These findings can be interpreted within the love as a commitment device perspective, which posits that love serves to maintain bonds even when partners and relationships are imperfect and they also fit evolutionary accounts predicting that transgressions which threaten reproductive success (infidelity) or survival and bodily integrity (aggression) are particularly likely to erode romantic love.
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Exploring the motivations behind collaboratively dishonest behaviour, is often done using dice-rolling experiments, where coordinated cheating increases participant pairs' earnings. Here we present a preregistered dice-rolling experiment that investigates how participants' dishonest (cheating) behaviour is influenced (i) by the dishonest (cheating) behaviour of their experimental partners and (ii) by by-product altruism (or cost-free charity) that is a direct consequence of a monetary reward in this experiment. We studied a 2 × 2 factorial design of the dice-rolling game, with the presence or absence of (i) a cheating partner and (ii) by-product altruism. Following the game, participants filled out the Moral Foundations Questionnaire and the Social Dominance Orientation questionnaire. We found that without the opportunity of cost-free charity, cheating was not detectable, independent of the cheating behaviour of the partner. However, the opportunity of donating to a chosen charitable foundation (cost-free charity) significantly increased the level of cheating. We found that the relationship between the degree of dishonesty and the measured psychological traits is complex and, in some cases, contradictory. Our results do, however, confirm that participants with a stronger moral integrity were less likely to cheat. Our results showed that the level of collaborative cheating to obtain a monetary benefit is significantly increased by participants' perception of acting in a socially beneficial way as a by-product of their unethical behaviour.
This study aimed to examine the psychological and behavioral determinants of AI-assisted academic dishonesty among university students through an integrated model. Specifically, the study investigated whether academic procrastination, learned helplessness, and academic self-efficacy predict cheating tendency; whether cheating tendency predicts AI-assisted academic dishonesty; whether AI use moderates the relationship between cheating tendency and academic dishonesty; and whether social and contextual factors significantly predict AI-assisted academic dishonesty. The study employed a quantitative, cross-sectional, correlational survey design. A total of 1,045 undergraduate students from different academic disciplines participated voluntarily in the study. Data were collected using seven measurement instruments and a personal information form. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analyses, multiple regression analyses, and Hayes' PROCESS Model 14 were used to test the proposed moderated mediation model. Bootstrap resampling with 5,000 samples was applied to estimate indirect effects and 95% confidence intervals. The findings showed that academic procrastination and learned helplessness positively predicted cheating tendency, whereas academic self-efficacy negatively predicted it. Cheating tendency significantly predicted AI-assisted academic dishonesty, and the interaction term indicated that the association between cheating tendency and AI-assisted academic dishonesty was stronger at higher levels of AI use. Conditional indirect effect analyses further demonstrated that cheating tendency mediated the effects of academic procrastination, learned helplessness, and academic self-efficacy on AI-assisted academic dishonesty, and these indirect effects became stronger at higher levels of AI use. In addition, social norms, peer behaviors, family attitudes, insufficient sanctions, teacher attitude, high expectations, and adverse conditions significantly predicted AI-assisted academic dishonesty, whereas ethical and moral education emerged as a negative predictor. The findings indicate that AI-assisted academic dishonesty should be understood as a multilevel outcome shaped by the interaction of psychological vulnerabilities, cognitive tendencies, technological affordances, and socio-contextual influences. The study contributes to the academic integrity literature by showing that AI use does not merely accompany dishonest tendencies but amplifies their translation into behavior. These results highlight the need for psychologically informed, ethically grounded, and institutionally supported interventions to reduce academic dishonesty in AI-enhanced higher education environments.
In standardized tests, examinees are likely to engage in either one or more following test behaviors: solution behavior, rapid guessing behavior, cheating behavior, nonresponse behavior, etc. Examinees do not always response all items with solution behavior due to various reasons (such as time constraint or low motivation). Aside from solution behavior, rapid guessing, cheating or nonresponse behavior can result in aberrant responses and inaccurate estimates of examinees' ability or trait, as well as item parameters, thus undermining the validity and fairness of the test. To address this issue, this paper aims to propose an IRTree model to that simultaneously considers rapid guessing, cheating and nonresponse behaviors in order to model the various behaviors exhibited by examinees. The proposed model offers a notable improvement over previous studies, as it provides additional classifications for examinee behaviors at both item and examinee levels. Furthermore, it is the first model to separate and simultaneously model guessing and cheating. Two real data sets are utilized to demonstrate the reasonableness and superiority of the proposed model. Subsequently, two simulation studies based on these real data sets are conducted to validate, revealing that it provide more precise estimates of person and item parameters compared to existing models, and explored the boundary condition of model application.
A recent review of honest signaling theory criticized constraint-based (index) explanations for traits that serve as honest signals of individual quality, contending that such explanations offer only proximate mechanisms and fail to explain evolutionary stability or the origin of reliability. A key point in this critique is the contention that ultimate explanations require the possibility of cheating. The authors advocate for the Signaling Trade-off Theory-where trade-offs make cheating evolutionarily unfavorable-as essentially a complete explanation for the evolution of signal honesty. Here we argue that this critique rests on a false dichotomy between proximate and ultimate explanation. When signal production is mechanistically embedded within vital cellular processes, this shared pathway inherently restricts the evolution of cheating. Using avian ketocarotenoid coloration as a model, we show that condition-dependent signal production is not explained by trade-offs because pigment transformation is coupled to mitochondrial energy metabolism and core cellular performance, making high-signal expression unattainable for low-condition individuals. Deception may therefore be physiologically inaccessible rather than merely costly. Moreover, the enzymatic machinery underlying ketocarotenoid production likely evolved for visual function before being co-opted for social assessment, such that condition-dependent color expression preceded assessment of coloration in social interactions. Uncheatable honest signals can thus arise as an exaptation of biochemical processes needed to sustain complex life rather than as outcomes of unfavorable trade-offs.
The current study used a classroom cheating paradigm to investigate how severity of punishment affects the rate at which bystanders report a transgression to an authority. Participants were asked to read and memorize a literary passage before taking a memory and comprehension quiz about its contents. The instructions included one of three conditions: low, medium, or high severity of punishment for cheating during the quiz. During the memorization and testing time, a confederate student cheated by using their phone. As predicted, participants' rate of reporting the observed cheating to the proctor was significantly different across the punishment conditions, with participants reporting least often in the high severity punishment condition. These findings suggest that severe punishments for transgressions may discourage whistleblowing behavior, highlighting the impact of punishment severity on whistleblowing decisions. Future work should further explore the motivations underlying this effect to elaborate on the link between punishment severity and whistleblowing.
Understanding the social structure and evolutionary dynamics of microbial communities requires the identification and characterization of relevant mutant subpopulations. While Pseudomonas aeruginosa employs quorum sensing (QS) to coordinate population-wide behaviors, the social traits of many QS mutants remain poorly defined. In this study, we developed an iterative "targeted gene duplication followed by mutant screening" (TGD-MS) approach to systematically identify noncanonical QS cheater mutants. We discovered that a single-nucleotide mutation in rpoA, which encodes the α subunit of RNA polymerase (RNAP), produces a QS-deficient phenotype resembling QS-null mutants. This RpoA variant mutant exhibits characteristic features of social cheating, including a competitive growth advantage in mixed populations, impaired QS-dependent virulence factor production, and attenuated pathogenicity. Structural and biochemical analyses revealed that the RpoA variant impairs RNAP binding to the promoters of core QS genes (lasI and lasR), leading to diminished QS activity. Further examination of natural RpoA variants uncovered a spectrum of QS-related phenotypes, suggesting that RpoA has a dual regulatory role in QS control. Within the C-terminal domain (α-CTD) of RpoA, we identified two distinct functional determinants that, through adaptive mutations, can acquire opposing regulatory effects on QS. This enables an environmentally dependent phenotypic switch between cooperation and cheating. Our discovery of noncanonical RpoA-mediated QS cheaters expands the framework of bacterial social evolution, demonstrating that mutations outside the canonical QS circuitry can disrupt cooperative behaviors. These findings underscore how core transcriptional machinery can be evolutionarily co-opted to modulate complex social interactions in dynamic environments.IMPORTANCETo understand how bacterial populations function and evolve, it is essential to identify socially significant subpopulations, including previously unrecognized types of cheaters. In this study, we uncover an unexpected role of RNA polymerase (RNAP) in regulating quorum sensing (QS) and QS-associated social behaviors in P. aeruginosa. Specifically, we demonstrate that the α subunit of RNAP (RpoA) is a key regulatory component in this process. A single-nucleotide mutation within the C-terminal domain of RpoA was found to alter QS activity, driving an environment-dependent transition between cooperative and cheating phenotypes. This discovery of this novel, noncanonical QS cheater mutant offers new insights into intra-population interactions, population stability, and evolutionary dynamics. These findings carry significant implications for microbial ecology and deepen our understanding of social evolution in bacterial communities.
Dependencies among microorganisms often appear mutualistic, as microbes grow faster together than alone. However, the Black Queen hypothesis (BQH) posits that these dependencies are underpinned by benefits from 'cheating' when others supply necessary common goods (CGs). The BQH often describes the evolution of a pair of ecotypes, a cooperator producing a CG and a cheater free-riding upon it. With multiple goods, their production can be centralized, with one ecotype producing everything and others cheating. We previously proposed an alternative BQH endpoint describing a community of 'mutual cheating', with production distributed over multiple interdependent ecotypes. Here, we present an individual-based eco-evolutionary model that predicts BQH dynamics resulting in various endpoints, including both distributed and centralizedproduction, and novel intermediate ecosystems involving apparent functional redundancy. These endpoints critically depend on the interaction range, the number of beneficiaries a producer can locally support. The intermediate ecosystems involve stable coexistence among ecotypes partially distributing production, with this coexistence punctuated by rare evolutionary transitions resulting in further distribution. These punctuated dynamics arise from cheaters stalling the division of labour by occupying the limited space within the producers' interaction ranges. Overall, our findings unveil complex evolutionary dynamics beyond the simple cheater-cooperator narrative, broadening the predictions of BQH.
This study examines how family influence shapes Emirati female students' motivations, coping strategies, and ethical behavior within higher education. Drawing on Durkheim's sociological perspective of education as moral socialization, it views the family as a meso-level institution that transmits collective consciences and sustains ethical responsibility across generations. While the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has achieved remarkable progress in women's higher education, family expectations continue to define educational and professional choices, mediating the balance between empowerment and conformity. Using original survey data from 1,233 female students at the United Arab Emirates University (UAEU), the analysis explores how family motivations and pressures interact with students' attitudes toward academic integrity and cheating behavior. Ordered probit regression models show that family influence is both enabling and constraining: family motivation is positively associated with diligence but may, under intense performance pressure, increase the likelihood of academic misconduct. Conversely, when family expectations are internalized as responsibility rather than anxiety, they strengthen students' ethical self-discipline. The findings further reveal that attitudes toward integrity-particularly the conviction that cheating is never justified-mediate the relationship between family influence and academic behavior, confirming that ethical orientation, once internalized, guides conduct more strongly than external control. The study contributes to debates on ethics and sustainability in education by demonstrating that families remain key socializing institutions, shaping academic integrity through the transmission of ethical values rather than coercive authority. Promoting sustainable integrity in the UAE thus requires engaging both students and families in culturally grounded ethics education that aligns academic achievement with collective responsibility and social trust.
RATIONALE: Healthy adults increasingly use drugs to enhance cognitive performance. However, these drugs influence brain systems that have also been associated with dishonesty. Given the prevalent use of potentially performance-enhancing drugs in contexts susceptible to cheating, it is crucial to ascertain whether they have adverse effects on honesty. OBJECTIVES: Our primary objective was to compare the effects of methylphenidate with those of placebo to determine the direction and magnitude of its potential influence on dishonest behavior. We furthermore examined the intuitions of people who use smart drugs about the effects of methylphenidate on cheating in a US representative sample. METHODS: We conducted a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment to compare the effects of methylphenidate (Ritalin), a popular performance-enhancing drug, and compared its effects with atomoxetine (Strattera), another performance-enhancing drug with a distinct pharmacological mechanism. Participants were randomly assigned to receive either a placebo (n = 52), methylphenidate (n = 49), or atomoxetine (n = 50). Subsequently, they performed a die-rolling task in which they could increase their earnings by dishonestly misreporting their outcomes. Additionally, a representative sample of 575 American participants indicated their performance-enhancing drugs use and intuitions about the effects of these drugs on dishonesty. RESULTS: Our findings show that, compared to the placebo condition, methylphenidate reduced dishonesty. This effect was not attributable to statistical fluctuations, demand effects, or domain-general mechanisms such as mood or attention. In addition, individuals who use drugs to enhance performance have limited intuitions about the impact of methylphenidate on dishonest behavior. CONCLUSION: These results reveal an unforeseen consequence associated with methylphenidate and may have policy implications regarding the paradoxical relationship between the use of drugs for performance enhancement and their potential impact on honesty.