A Canary Alive: What Cheating Reveals About Morality and Its Development
Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: Reports of academic cheating trigger fears of moral decay. This inference, that cheating is a dying canary in the coal mine of morality, assumes that youth who cheat lack genuine, moral concerns with honesty and integrity. This article proposes an alternative perspective on cheating and dishonesty. We propose that cheating and other forms of dishonesty result from (1) misperceptions of what constitutes cheating, (2) evaluations that cheating or lying is okay under exceptional circumstances, and (3) prioritization of non-integrity actions during conflict. Each of these three steps—perceptions, evaluations, and action-selections—show both situational and developmental variability. From this perspective, research on cheating shows moral engagement, not moral disengagement: Developmental and psychological research shows that, far from being a dying canary, cheating reveals the pervasive role of morality in decision-making.
Authors: Audun Dahl, Talia Waltzer
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4409096476