Does reciting the Ten Commandments reduce cheating behaviour?
Farewell summer, and welcome to a new academic year! On the bright side, Halloween and Christmas are upon us, and you get to catch up with all your friends. On the downside, however, is the university-associated stress: coursework, presentations and examinations. Even for the post-graduates amongst us, the amount of stress we face upon assessments and deadline is tremendous – you either sacrifice sleep or your social life to maintain your academics. Nevertheless, there is always a mischievous way to dodge the problem: cheating. While we all know it is wrong, and this article is by no means promoting cheating, one question had baffled psychologists around the globe for years: why do people do it?
One theory by Lawrence Kohlberg suggests that we establish moral reasoning during development. With education, we would mature and gain a rational reasoning capability, which allows us to make the right choice with a morally-correct motive. Others suggested that cheating is a choice, where people would weigh out the pros and cons of the act to determine whether to cheat or not. Other psychologists suggested that the decision is not entirely by choice, as it is subconsciously influenced by the environment, where experiments had shown that people tend to cheat more in a darkened room, as compared to a brightly lit room. It has also been suggested that body posture can influence whether a person would cheat: as a person who assumes power poses (taking as much space as they can) is more likely to cheat on a test or park illegally.
Understanding why people cheat can allow school and universities to prevent cheating. It had been shown that placing mirrors within sight can alone lower rates of stealing in stores, as it serves as a tool for self-reflection upon doing the deed. In 2008, a study even showed that writing down the Ten Commandments prior to a test can reduce the rate of cheating, whether you are religious or not. All these suggested that upon the reminder of moral rules, people are less likely to cheat. In practice, perhaps this is why students are recited the rules and regulations prior to taking an exam.
However, a recent study proved otherwise. In a sample size of 4674 participants across 19 labs, participants were asked to recite the Ten Commandments, or titles of 10 books that they recently read, before conducting a series of reasoning tasks. At the end of the test, participants would be asked how many tasks they accomplished. If the experiments in the past hold true, those that memorised the Ten Commandments would have a lower score than the ‘book-title’ group, since they should be less likely to exaggerate how many tasks they answered correctly.
Contrarily, the participants in the Ten Commandments group had a higher problem-solving rate than the other group, suggesting a moral reminder is not useful in preventing cheating. Nonetheless, other factors could have affected the results. For one, the culture of the participants may influence the outcome, as the Ten Commandments may not activate participants’ moral sense in some countries. Furthermore, the presence of cameras may affect the level of honesty in the participants. Since it was proven in the past, that the sense of being watched can reduce dishonest acts – the environment can certainly have an effect on the outcome. Otherwise, the size of the session may also impact on the level of dishonesty. While the outcome of the experiment is anonymous, a larger group may give a sense of security to the participants, where there is a less chance of others discovering they were deceitful. As a result, a smaller experiment session may promote honesty and vice versa.
To conclude, it is unclear whether moral reminders can reduce dishonest acts, so there is no rush to printing the Bible verse and placing it in your significant others’ wallet, or taking it inside the exam halls. The next logical step from this study would be to collect more empirical data to unravel the complexity of this problem, taking into consideration of different factors such as environment, ethnicity and upbringing, group sizes, and religious belief into consideration when repeating and validating a study like this.
