Whenever I read a study that involves asking participants whether they think a behavior is wrong or ask them to predict how they would respond to something, I always worry about the impact of social desirability. I struggle with this issue in my own scenario-based research. Do you have any thoughts on how social desirability may have impacted your participants and their responses?

Peer pressure is a huge reason why cheating occurs in the classroom, so this study is so important! I loved the peer pressure vignette that you showed as an example for us to understand what the participants went through. I do have to agree with Dr. Wilson’s statement that self-report biases might be impacted by social desirability. For this reason, I’m really glad you included “Alex” to showcase someone else to put the blame to. As I experienced with my study, I really believe this study would have been more effective in an actual classroom setting where students don’t actually know they are being observed for cheating. You guys did a fabulous job with the constraints you had to work with in an online study with self-report. Very cool experiment!

This study was really well executed. Cheating is an important subject, especially right now with the use of technology during the pandemic. I am curious to see what would happen if the scenarios were changed. For example, what if the situations, Alex or his had a rough week and was tempted to cheat because of their situation. Would people be more understanding to Alex’s situation and cheat themselves? This would allow us to look at the external factors and reasoning behind cheating, and if some situations are considered more moral to cheat than others. Amazing job!

You all mention the possibility that people may have viewed the scenarios as unrealistic. I know you had wrongness of the behavior as a dependent variable, but did you consider having a manipulation check to see if participants differentiated between the indirect and direction scenarios and saw them as such? That might help to interpret the lack of a difference between direct and indirect.

I never thought about peer pressure being a reason for cheating! The vignette was on point in demonstrating that aspect and was able to reinforce that perspective to show how peer pressure influences students to participate in cheating behavior.

It’s so nice to see another group with Alex-based cheating vignettes! I know in our group we struggled with the question of whether students would apply the academic scenarios – ostensibly about a random student – to themselves, but I like the way that your group tried to evaluate both the participant’s own feelings and how they imagine Alex would feel as separate dependent variables.

Good job !

Is the study also considering the time we are living in or is it just in general?

HI great job!
do you think that the COVID-19 pandemic impacted your results at all?

This is a very interesting study! Peer pressure is absolutely a factor that largely contributes to cheating and you all had strong literature to back that up. I believed that direct peer pressure would have had a stronger effect than indirect cheating too and was surprised to find that there wasn’t like correlation in the Alex portion of your study. Like you said, there may have been a different outcome if you were able to perform thIs experiment in a classroom setting. Great job!

This is very relevant and interesting topic to explore, especially right now with the move to online learning! With the move to online learning, a lot of students are more likely to cheat due to wide range of resources that are available at one spot/time.

I think it would have been great if this study would have taken place in a classroom and see how much the results would’ve changed. Overall great job!!

Great presentation, I know you all mentioned the majority of students in this study were college first years, do you think that the results would be different if the participants had been predominantly upperclass?