After Cheating On A Test, People Claim To Have Known The Answers Anyway

By Emily Reynolds Cheating is common, ranging from benign instances like looking up an answer on your phone during a pub quiz, to the fairly major, such as using a series of coughs to fraudulently bag yourself a million pounds on a popular TV game show. But wherever we fall on that scale, research suggests, we’re still likely to think of ourselves as honest and trustworthy. There’s something of a tension here — we’re seemingly both prone to cheating and convinced of our own integrity. Matthew L. Stanley and colleagues from Duke University have one explanation for this apparent contradiction in their latest paper in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review: when we cheat, we claim we knew the answers all along. Before the start of the study proper, the team conducted a pilot test with 95 participants, who were shown 24 general knowledge questions; half were easy (“how many legs does a spider have?”) while the other half were more difficult (“Which nation was the first to ratify the United Nations charter in 1945?”). No participants correctly answered any of the 12 difficult questions. In the first study, 147 participants saw these 24 questions and had to type in the answers. Before answering, they were told the correct answer would be visible to them, upside down in a small font on the bottom right of their screens. Looking at the answer, they were told, as well as looking things up online, was considered cheating. After a short unrelated task, part...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Morality Source Type: blogs