Students with Dark Triad traits don ’t feel responsible for their own learning, making them more likely to cheat

By Emma Young Plagiarism and cheating are persistent problems in higher education, note the authors of a new paper in Personality and Individual Differences. Better ways of combatting academic misconduct are clearly needed. And in their paper, Guy J. Curtis at the University of Western Australia and colleagues report that they’ve found one: encouraging students to take personal responsibility for their own learning. Recent work has consistently linked various forms of cheating to higher scores on the “Dark Triad” personality traits of psychopathy, Macchiavelianism and narcissism, and also to stronger feelings of “academic entitlement”. Academically entitled students believe that they deserve special or better treatment than is typically given to others. As the researchers explain, this can involve a number of distinctly unappealing beliefs: that the student deserves above average grades, no matter what effort they put in; that instructors should be at their beck and call; and that when their assignments are marked, everyday problems should be regarded as reasons to up their grade. (Sound familiar? I can think of a number of academic friends who would immediately agree.) Work to date has viewed the Dark Triad and academic entitlement as distinct factors that link independently to academic misconduct. But Curtis and his colleagues wondered if Dark Triad traits might in fact drive feelings of academic entitlement, which then drives mis...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Educational Personality Source Type: blogs