Attitudes toward time are associated with academic cheating, according to research published in the journal Learning and Individual Differences.
The study of 623 Hungarian high school students found that future time perspective was negatively related to academic cheating, while present hedonistic time perspective was positively related to academic cheating. Future time perspective describes an attitude of focusing on long-term goals, while present hedonistic time perspective describes an attitude of focusing on seeking pleasure at the current moment.
PsyPost interviewed the study’s corresponding author, Gábor Orosz of Eötvös Loránd University. Read his explanation of the research below:
PsyPost: Why were you interested in this topic?
Orosz: In Eastern European countries, students cheat a lot both in higher and secondary education. For example, in Albania, 92% of the respondents reported collaborative exam cheating (i.e., copying, whispering) on the basis of prior studies. Similar high prevalence numbers were also reported in Slovenia with 85% and Romania with 72%. In Western or Northern European countries these numbers are much smaller, with 14% being in the UK and 1% in Sweden. In Hungary (another Eastern European country) where we carried out this study, three-fourth of the students have cheated at least once during the last semester. According to an unpublished dataset, when we ask students in their exam period whether they cheated during their last exam, more than 30% said yes. Therefore, cheating is a very serious issue in Eastern European countries. I find this topic interesting because, as a teacher, I would like to motivate my students to learn as much as they can and show them the pleasure of learning. I find cheating as a symptom of an educational system that cannot provide the optimal conditions for learning. Furthermore, several prior studies found relatively strong links between academic cheating and workplace dishonesty. I hope that doing research in this field and providing scientifically grounded guidelines can have positive impact on school and workplace integrity as well.
For these reasons, we carried out a series of studies in order to investigate the most important situational and person-related predictors of academic cheating. As many prior US studies showed that competition and extrinsic motivation (i.e., getting a good grade, avoiding to fail the exam) is a relevant predictor of cheating, we carried out a study to examine this relationship and we found that instead of extrinsic motivation and competition, two motivations were more important: intrinsic motivation (i.e., they are motivated to learn because they are interested in the material and they can find fun and pleasure in learning) and amotivation (i.e., the lack of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation; when they are asked why do you go to school, they respond: I don’t know). Of course, intrinsically motivated students cheat less, while amotivated students cheat more. In a further study, we found that if a student has a lot of enthusiastic teachers, he or she will cheat less. Furthermore, those students who had a lot of enthusiastic teachers were much more intrinsically motivated and, in turn, less amotivated.
In a third study, we were interested in another individual difference that might be behind cheating: time perspective in terms of how students put emphasis on the pleasure of the present moment instead of thinking about the future events and long-term goals. Time perspective (see a video about it here) is an unconscious and individually determined attitude toward time including five dimensions: past-positive, past-negative, present-hedonistic, present-fatalistic and future time perspectives. From the perspective of cheating high school students, future and present hedonistic time perspective were the most interesting. Present hedonistic time perspective refers to a pleasure-seeking and risk-taking attitude where one concentrates on the immediate satisfaction of needs while, at the same time, ignoring possible future consequences. On the other hand, while Future time perspective is a generally future-oriented view of time in which striving for future goals and rewards are predominant. Our main result was that present hedonistic time perspective was positively related to academic cheating, whereas future time perspective was negatively related to academic cheating. These relationships remained significant when we considered the above-mentioned motivational variables (intrinsic, extrinsic and amotivation) as possible mediators between time perspective and cheating. Furthermore, we could demonstrate again that, in the Eastern European educational context, it is not extrinsic motivation (getting good grades or avoiding punishments) that matters, but amotivation and intrinsic motivation: amotivation was a predictor of cheating, whereas intrinsic motivation was a good antidote of cheating. Finally, in line with prior findings, if one had future time perspective, he or she will be more intrinsically motivated.
What should the average person take away from your study?
In the case of future-oriented students, less cheating can be expected, whereas present hedonistic students will be more likely to cheat in school. However, the good news is that one’s time perspective can be changed. Time perspective is not a fixed trait that cannot be modified as Zimbardo’s team found that time perspective patterns can be changed in as few as eight sessions. Another important issue is that, in order to reduce cheating in school, it is not optimal to create fully future-oriented kids without present hedonistic time perspective; it is important to create a balanced time perspective in which students are mostly characterized by future, present hedonistic and past positive time perspectives, and less characterized by past negative and present fatalistic time perspectives. Creating balanced time perspective is not easy as it requires a temporal flexibility in which we find time to advance our projects (future), we find time to have fun (present hedonistic), and to spend time with our parents and grandparents (past positive).
As Phil Zimbardo says: future time perspective gives us wings to fly, present hedonism energizes us, and past positive time perspective gives us roots. In the present study, we found that putting more emphasis on future time perspective and putting less emphasis on present hedonistic time perspective can reduce cheating. It is important to build those students’ future time perspective who are not future-oriented, and decrease excessive present hedonism for this purpose. However, from a higher perspective, I would say that it is important to fine tune our time perspective towards a balanced one in which we have the necessary time for work, fun, and nostalgia without being fatalistic or being sad about past events. It can have long-lasting positive consequences on our health, performance, and well-being. For achieving this balance, some of the students need to be more future-oriented, some need to be more present hedonistic and some should focus more on the positive past events. On the basis of our results, strengthening the future time perspective of less industrious, planning-focused students and, at the same time, reducing present hedonistic time perspective of extremely risk- and pleasure-seeker students can make a difference in reducing academic dishonesties.
Are there any major caveats?
As it was a self-reported questionnaire-based study, it had several limitations. As self-reported, cross-sectional methods were applied, possible biases have to be considered when interpreting the findings (e.g., memory recall biases). Moreover, causality cannot be inferred from the present findings. Further measures are needed in future studies that could directly measure the respondent’s cheating behaviors. Longitudinal studies are needed to investigate these patterns over a longer period of time, a semester for instance. Experimental designs could also be employed to investigate causality between the above mentioned construct. The samples were Hungarian and not internationally representative which limits the generalizability of the results. Further replication studies are needed in different cultural and age groups in order to draw a more solid conclusion about the relationship between time perspectives, motivations and academic cheating.
What questions still need to be addressed?
Future studies might explore the beneficial effect of a balanced time perspective intervention on students motivation, learning, academic performance and cheating as well. Following the “wise intervention” principles of Greg Walton and David Yeager, it would be great to create a brief online intervention focusing on how to create balanced time perspective among students. Edina Dombi, one of the co-authors of this paper is working on such project now.
The study, “Academic cheating and time perspective: Cheaters live in the present instead of the future“, was also co-authored by Edina Dombi, István Tóth-Király, Beáta Bőthe, Balázs Jagodics, and Philip G. Zimbardo.
