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Tell Your Students That if They Cheat, God Will Smite Them

April 21, 2011, 2:13 pm

Creation of the Sun and Moon by Michelangelo, face detail of God.

Is God:
A) punitive, angry, and vengeful?
B) warm, loving, and forgiving?

OK, folks, pencils down. Now, if you chose B, you probably cheated your way through college.

Two psychology researchers — Azim F. Shariff, at the University of Oregon,  and Ara Norenzayan, at the University of British Columbia — found in a pair of studies that students who believe that God is kind and gentle are more likely to cheat on tests.

In the first study, 61 undergraduates were asked to take a mathematics test on a computer that contained a software glitch. If they failed to press the space bar immediately after reading each problem, the glitch would cause the correct answer to appear on the screen and that just wouldn’t be fair. After taking the test, the students were asked about their perceptions of God.

Of course the sneaky researchers — believers in a benevolent God, no doubt — had peeked to see who had used the space bar and who hadn’t. While they found no differences between self-described believers and non-believers, the psychologists discovered that the students who think of God as angry and punitive were significantly less likely to have cheated.

In the second study, which was crafted to remove potential variables like personality and religious affiliation, 39 undergraduates answered questions about a number of topics, including their views on God. Several days later, they took the same math test on a computer with the same “software glitch” and posted the same results as the earlier study: The ones who believed in a loving God were more likely to have cheated.

“Taken together, our findings demonstrate, at least in some preliminary way, that religious beliefs do have an effect on moral behavior, but what matters more than whether you believe in a god is what kind of god you believe in,” Mr. Shariff said. “There is a relationship: Believing in a mean god, a punishing one, does contribute to cheating behavior. Believing in a loving, forgiving god seems to have an opposite effect.”

Mr. Shariff invoked the “supernatural punishment hypothesis” in describing his study, which was reported in the International Journal for the Psychology of Religion.

Perhaps if more students could see their cheating classmates struck by lightning, academic dishonesty would be a thing of the past.  —Don Troop

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  • iriselina

    Good to read all this.So true. I wrote the first paragraph to Ch:5 of my doc.dissn while stuck in a traffic jam as I was inspired to do so and later I felt I could not have improved it any further.( I was not driving, but in the backseat !)
    Wish I could get students to believe this: to keep track of moments of insight as we are bound to forget later.Always carry paper and pencil with you! The Mind is greater than your conscious self!

  • thomaslawrencelong

    Your observations are consistent with the literature on scholarly productivity, particularly Robert Boice’s concept of two maladaptive behaviors: bingeing and busyness. Boice has identified the counterproductive behaviors as grounded in the beliefs that one must have long uninterrupted time to accomplish writing or that one is simply too busy to accomplish any writing. His intervention entails changing the behavior: getting faculty to write every day, even if only for 30 minutes. I encourage my faculty writers in nursing to do the same and offer other support at: http://nursingwriting.wordpress.com/

  • kslockeman

    Thank you for the Boice reference. Although I have been told that I write well, I have always struggled with the process of completing a paper… any paper, and my behavior is definitely characterized by binging and busyness. As a second year PhD student, I have been worrying about how I will ever get a dissertation done. I think I will check out Boice’s advice.

  • http://okstate.academia.edu/JohnFoubert John D. Foubert, Ph.D.

    How can anyone say that a study of this nature based on 61 participants in one case and 39 in another is remotely generalizable?

  • selfg

    Be careful what you say; your research assistant was just smitten with a plague of locusts.

  • 12037289

    Agreed on the sample size. Also, is there anything to suggest this correlation is actually meaningful? It seems rather a “leap of faith” on the part of the researchers to conclude that students who answered A) refrain from cheating because they’re concerned about smiting. So many assumptions being made here….

  • auntieintellectual

    I thought Religious people didn’t “believe” in Mathematics…God hates you, your DATA, and your little dog, too! BUWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! BZZZZZTTT!!!!!!!!

  • 11182967

    A student’s expressed belief about God here is probably a surrogate for the student’s general belief in the likelihood of punishment for wrongdoing. I suspect that if the question was phrased in terms of whether or not the student throught he or she would get caught that the numbers would be about the same. I’ve long since given up the Calvinist theology I was raised on, but “Calvinist psychology”–ingrained fear of punishment–I’m probably stuck with forever.

  • jefffager

    Did anyone else notice that the quote from Mr. Shariff says just the opposite of the article? “‘Believing in a mean god, a punishing one, does contribute to cheating behavior,’ Mr. Shariff said.”

    So which is it? (The link in the article no longer works.)

  • greeneyeshade

    *If* the results have any validity (reasonably questioned heretofore), a lesson for teachers of ethics/morals could be that they haven’t taught the insidiousness of presumption very well. Those who presume they will be forgiven are doing something even worse than the bad deed itself.

  • tribblek

    I read that as “does INFLUENCE cheating behavior.” He’s not really saying that it contributes to an INCREASE in cheating behavior… just that it is a contributing factor in whether or not someone decides to cheat.

  • rogue_academic

    Okay, so students who believed in warm and fuzzy God thought the glitch was a gift. Those who thought God was evil and punitive probably thought it was a trap. But what about those who didn’t believe in God at all?

  • koufax33

    After a great on-campus interview for a student affairs position at a large midwest University, I sent thank you cards to the search committee members. Unknown to me, one of those I sent was a blank thank-you card, nothing written inside. I was offered the position two days later.

    Two months into my new job, I receive back a thank you card, which the card itself was rather quite familiar to me. She thanked me for accepting the job, etc and said she was glad they hired me, even if I sent blank thank cards. Zing! Since then, I always double check my cards before sealing an envelope!

  • hawki72

    Chalk up one more for the Taliban!

  • archman

    Best CHE article title EVER.

  • gammapoint

    As awesome as this conclusion would be, 61 participants is not enough for me to believe it, even though I’d very much like to. They should really repeat the study with at least 10x that number.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/X6WPVJFLNJTT32P44XRBJUACX4 RH

    That’s why I had to laugh when a Protestant friend said “Catholics can do whatever they want, they’ll be forgiven by going to Confession”. But Protestants just have to accept JC as Lord, and they’ll be forgiven, they don’t even have to bother with Confession!

  • 11122741

    this study is not about god, it is about environments where there ARE consequences for your actions and environments where the are NOT consequences. Right now we are in an era where there are very few id any consequences for one’s actions (a kind and forgiving god environment) andf particularly so in higher ed and on wall street: god and religious beliefs are not necessary to figure this one out and in fact only mask the situation or problem.

  • http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/X6WPVJFLNJTT32P44XRBJUACX4 RH

    As an atheist who happens to teach college, this article is a great example of why morals and ethics are the real concern, and faith is a load of hooey. I know truly evil devout people, and I know truly evil atheists. The problem is the “well-meaning” person, who rationalizes everything based on their own idea of “good”. If “good” means “pass this class so my parents aren’t wasting their money and I don’t have the shame of failing,” cheating is a way to achieve “good”. Those who feel that learning, and knowledge, are more important than grades won’t cheat, because they know that the point of taking a class is to leave it with a better understanding of the subject matter, and the ability to apply it. I didn’t earn a great undergraduate GPA, but I did earn it.

  • chgoodrich

    Yes, noticed that. And in theory, we should believe the *quotation* rather than the journalistic analysis, right? Unless, of course, the quote’s wrong, too…..

  • saluki87

    Not being involved in the softer sciences, what is the value of this knowledge, even if it is correct? I suppose gaining knowledge simply for the sake of gaining knowledge is something. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one mentioned in the popular press as an example of waste by elitist faculty and their institutions who have disdain for “traditional values.” I wouldn’t agree, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it occurred.

  • quiero_leer

    Oh, c’mon… at least read the article about the article before this article:

    “Even though the trend found in the new study was significant, Shariff cautioned, the results are preliminary. Specifically, the research focused on academic cheating, which is only one type of moral behavior. It is unclear whether the pattern of results will generalize to encouraging positive behaviors, such as generosity. Researchers should examine other impacts of how views of God may influence other types of both negative and positive moral behaviors.

    “In the journal Science in 2008, Shariff and Norenzayan reviewed 30 years of social science research and argued that there is a nuanced, but very important relationship between religion and moral behavior. Before their review of the literature was done, Norenzayan said in 2008, the public debate on whether religion fosters cooperation and trust had been driven by opinion and anecdote. The current studies add to the recent efforts to inject scientific evidence into the debate.”

    Or–gasp!–THE ACTUAL STUDY:

    http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/section?content=a936635720&fulltext=713240928

    “A related question that cannot be addressed with the current data is that of religious differences. Given the vast variation in the types of supernatural agents across religions, an important empirical question is whether these beliefs are differentially successful at reducing cheating and fostering honest behavior. Although religious affiliation did not predict cheating behavior in Study 2, the size and diversity of our samples were too limited to adequately address this question. Indeed, our small sample sizes generally limited our analysis of relevant moderating variables. Future studies using larger sample sizes and selective sampling of different religions could contribute much to addressing these fascinating theoretical issues.

    “Finally, three methodological issues limit the conclusions that can be drawn from the current findings. First, the artificiality of the employed cheating measure needs to be considered when making claims based on these data. That said, although identical or closely related variants of this paradigm have been used before (e.g., Bering, McLoed, & Shackelford, 2005; Vohs & Schooler, 2008), all lab-based cheating measures have their weaknesses. Thus, replicating the present findings with complementary studies conducted outside the lab, with more naturalistic measures of cheating, would increase confidence in our conclusions.

    “Second, the link between views of God and cheating behavior revealed by the current data is a correlational finding and therefore should be interpreted with caution. Although a correlational design is appropriate given that our question of interest was specifically concerned with how chronic dispositional beliefs are related to behavior rather than the acute situational effects seen in recent priming studies (Randolph-Seng & Neilsen, 2007; Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007), causal direction cannot be unambiguously determined from such designs. That said, the current relationship persisted after controlling for relevant personality dimensions and demographic background, and after ruling out any possible influence of cheating on views of God. Therefore, at least with reference to the factors we tested, third variable and reverse causation explanations of the data were not supported.

    “Third, the two samples in this study consisted of North American university students, which limits claims of generalizability across populations. Although there was considerable ethnic and religious diversity, students samples in general are often psychological outliers and data that rely on these samples exclusively should be interpreted with caution (Henrich, Heine, & Norenzayan, 2010).

    “Conclusion

    These two studies provide evidence that the connection between religion, measured as an individual difference variable, and counternormative behavior is more complex than simply finding relationships with trait religiosity. The current research is consistent with the prior findings that overall religiosity is unrelated to cheating but supports the hypothesis that belief in fearsome punishing supernatural agents—mean gods—does predict more honest behavior in anonymous situations.”

    Q.E.D.

  • pmckechn

    Or as Socrates put it, ‘No one does wrong willingly’.

  • boiler

    It’s a cute study, but it doesn’t demonstrate what Mr. Sharif says it does. It doesn’t show that “religious beliefs do have an effect on moral behavior.” It shows that there’s an association between a particular view of God and a particular kind of morally significant action. Association isn’t the same thing as causality, and the action described has other features besides its morality.

  • rebelgirl

    At the end of Crito, the laws tell Socrates that “you leave this place a victim not of laws, but of men.” When Socrates says “willingly,” doesn’t he mean no one does wrong having thought through the implications of actions clearly? (I always thought that was more moral suasion than analysis anyway: surely even Socrates knew a few plagiarists, and worse.)

  • raza_khan

    Okay… here is my issue with the artcile on a professional level.

    Currently, as part of my promotion project, I am looking at elements of our program learning outcomes. I have data and preliminary results for 400 students over 2 years of study. However, I would find it unthinkable to compile my thoughts together and write an article for Chronicle that is read and commented too nationwide and internationally as well.

    As much as interesting are the findings of the article, I find that it very premature work and should not have been considered for any publicatoin (local, regional or national) unless it has been duplicated and replicated at least 3 to 4 times over several years….

    Raza
    __________________________
    Raza Khan, Ph.D.
    dr.raza.khan@gmail.com

  • mbelvadi

    But what about the person who realizes that there is such a huge disconnect between the value of learning and the functional purpose of the gpa, that they can separate in their minds the act of cheating to boost the gpa in order to achieve the “secular” aims of a univ degree, while at the same time trying to actually learn as much as they can to achieve their “spiritual” aims. I never cheated, but I suffered through enough stupid long-paper and “group project” assignments that had absolutely nothing to do (that I could perceive) with the real and valuable material I was learning in the lectures and readings that I can completely sympathize with the pragmatist who might see the learning process and the gpa as completely orthogonal goals.

  • mbelvadi

    But if everyone did as you say, how would anyone ever earn tenure? Their publication rate would be far too low!

  • sfeasterlewis

    This is an interesting study. I would like to see more on the topic. Students who cheat on tests do so for a variety of reasons — including they haven’t studied or they don’t feel well. Actually they are breaking two Commandments — “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not bear false witness [lie].” Pressure on teachers and students is huge. Some teachers cheat when they give students the answers to standardized tests and lie about the scores in order to look good.. Are we letting our students get away with not learning the content? Are we letting some teachers get away with giving out answers to standardized tests (in the name of getting good scores)? They — students, their parents, teachers, principals, and parents — should strive to meet these two standards, which are appropriate for everyone, everywhere.. Have you ever lied about an action or stolen answers or ideas from someone else? Hmmmm.

  • mcphslibrary

    How about the people who don’t believe in god, how do they fare? Or how about the ones who have read the bible and realize that ‘that god’ is neither A nor B but a combiniation of the two….how do they do on the study?

  • jadee

    LOL! I think maybe this article explains the behavior of many of the students at Holier than Thou Christian University where we have chapel every morning. Not only do these students cheat, but they also expect and demand that any and all of their bad actions to be excused and accepted with impunity! Wow, who knew?

  • daisy99

    In my experience the people that are motivated by the fear of God, end up getting mad at God at some point in life and start cheating in some way. I’m not afraid of a god and I never cheat. I’m motivated by a desire to get closer to God and the belief that the truth will bring me closer, not cheating, lying or stealing.

  • morningsider

    As a member of multiple search committees, I am looking for reasons to narrow the pool. Just yesterday I put two applications in the “no” pile: one had put the incorrect institution name in the cover letter, the other had left *blanks* for the institution name and job title!

    I will not consider a candidate who has not taken time to proofread and/or individualize a cover letter. What else will that person be careless about? How much could that person really want this job if s/he can’t be bothered to individualize an application to explain how how s/he fits our job position?

    Is that harsh to hold applicants to such a standard? Or should I eliminate those candidates for other (possibly arbitrary) reasons? Shouldn’t carelessness count toward disqualification?

  • dralexanderhamilton

    But it’s wrong for college students to take money or get paid? The hypocrisy continues!

  • goxewu

    Over on other threads there’s a lot of twaddle (particularly from someone named John Infante who’s job is something called “assistant director of compliance” at Colorado State University) about the NCAA trying so valiantly to improve eligibility standards, making sure that “student-athletes” are really qualified students, etc. One can see that this three-BILLION-dollar deal is really going to help reform along. $3,000,000,000 vs. academic integrity: place your bets, ladies & gents.

  • 22051084

    I would hope they would have to pay taxes on this!!

  • _perplexed_

    You can bet that not a single cent of the annual $21m bonanza per campus will ever be spent on anything academic, and the student fees that support athletics will not be reduced.

  • seniorprofessor

    Several budgetary studies have shown that these kinds of funds (including BCA, etc.) do help the non-profitable sports programs but do not flow or flow in minuscule amounts into academics. Typical is the case of Boise State University which now has its hand out to taxpayers to pay for a new stadium (much of it for the benefit of the wealthy alum business community) while academic programs are being cut back for a lack of state funding, etc.

    Some of this money gets taxed but the creative accountants manage to hide most of it under the “education” tax-free boxes long enough to escape, then it goes back to Athletics, Inc. It’s high margin money too since the workers are not paid; only the coaches are in 7-8 figure salaries.

    College Athletics, Inc. is taxpayer fraud waiting to be exposed.

  • badger74

    Until they start writing checks to cover their attendance, room & board, books etc. the athletes are getting paid pretty well. The total value at an our of state or private university is upwards of $50,000 per year–tax free to the student/athlete. That’s about $75,000 before tax equivalent. Yes, they work hard for that in the income sports such as football and basketball. But for every player that gets the scholarship deal there are 100 that would love to take their spot. So there already is a market clearing amount being paid.
    What the extra money will do is allow some of the smaller PAC 12 schools such as WSU compete without needing to ask the students or state for more money.

  • goxewu

    With the “education” that most revenue-sports athletes–many of them grossly under-qualified to be matriculating students at the big universities for whom they play–manage to eke out after they’ve put in all that practice time, game time, travel time, training time, yeah, they’re “paid pretty well”…in the equivalent of counterfeit money.

  • fortysomethingprof

    86% of those who graduated from high school _last year_ think getting a college degree is worth it?  How would they know?

  • gahnett

    Yes, I agree with fortysomethingprof.

    The poll asks the attendees that have yet to be the primary payees.  Ask them in five years if it was worth it or ask the parents who are footing the bill.

  • dailyreader

    Maybe this small summary is incomplete but I can’t help but wonder why they would ask high school graduates if going to college was worth it.  And of those who didn’t 80% plan to do it later.  Well, naturally they would. 

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