Students cheat more: Comparing dishonesty of a student and a representative sample in the laboratory

TY - JOUR

T1 - Students cheat more

T2 - Comparing dishonesty of a student and a representative sample in the laboratory

AU - Fosgaard, Toke Reinholt

PY - 2020/1/1

Y1 - 2020/1/1

N2 - Unethical behavior has been found in numerous experiments, yet mainly among university students. The use of student participants is potentially problematic for generalizability and the resulting policy recommendations. In this paper, I report on an experiment with potential dishonesty. The experiment was completed by a representative non-student sample and a student sample. The results show that cheating does exist, but also that students cheat systematically more. This suggests that focusing on students as participants tends to overestimate the magnitude of cheating. I further find that age is an important explanation for this difference in dishonesty. The older the participants are, the less they cheat.

AB - Unethical behavior has been found in numerous experiments, yet mainly among university students. The use of student participants is potentially problematic for generalizability and the resulting policy recommendations. In this paper, I report on an experiment with potential dishonesty. The experiment was completed by a representative non-student sample and a student sample. The results show that cheating does exist, but also that students cheat systematically more. This suggests that focusing on students as participants tends to overestimate the magnitude of cheating. I further find that age is an important explanation for this difference in dishonesty. The older the participants are, the less they cheat.

U2 - 10.1111/sjoe.12326

DO - 10.1111/sjoe.12326

M3 - Journal article

SN - 0347-0520

VL - 122

SP - 257

EP - 279

JO - Scandinavian Journal of Economics

JF - Scandinavian Journal of Economics

IS - 1

ER -