Cheating in primary school: Experimental evidence on ego-depletion and individual factors

Tamás Keller (), Hubert Janos Kiss and Szabolcs Számadó ()
Additional contact information
Szabolcs Számadó: Department of Sociology and Communication, Budapest University of Technology and Economics. 1111 Budapest, Egry J. u. 1. E.71. and Computational Social Science - Research Center for Educational and Network Studies, Centre for Social Sciences. 1097 Budapest, Tóth Kálmán utca 4. and Evolutionary Systems Research Group, Centre for Ecological Research

No 2048, CERS-IE WORKING PAPERS from Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies

Abstract: We contribute to the experimental literature on primary school students’ cheating behavior by studying i) how cheating is influenced by ego depletion; ii) how it correlates with different individual factors. We carried out a large-scale, pre-registered experiment in the field of 28 Hungarian primary schools (126 classrooms) on a voluntary subsample of 1,143 students at grade levels 4 to 8. Students’ cheating behavior was measured by the incentivized dice-roll experiment. We find suggestive evidence that our light-touch treatment on ego-depletion increased students’ deceptive behavior. Cheating behavior correlated weakly with students’ individual characteristics. In a multivariate context controlling for between-classroom differences, we document that students’ cognitive ability correlated negatively, while their age positively, with their cheating behavior. We found students’ social context (their classroom belonging) as a more decisive determinant of students’ cheating behavior than individual characteristics.

Keywords: honesty; cheating; individual factors; ego depletion; dice-roll exercise; pre-registered experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C91 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2020-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-eur, nep-exp and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mtakti.hu/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/CERSIEWP202048.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:has:discpr:2048

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CERS-IE WORKING PAPERS from Institute of Economics, Centre for Economic and Regional Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nora Horvath ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).