Narrow facets of honesty-humility predict collegiate cheating

As collegiate cheating is a growing concern across the world, researchers have started to explore personality traits for a better understanding of why students engage in such behavior. Whilst prior studies investigated the relationship between personality and general academic dishonesty criteria (vi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Personality and individual differences 2018-03, Vol.123, p.199-204
Main Authors: van Rensburg, Yolandi-Eloise Janse, de Kock, François S., Derous, Eva
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior
Cheating
College students
Collegiate cheating
Counter-academic behavior
Dishonesty
Global trait
Greed
Honesty
Honesty-humility
Narrow facets
Personality tests
Personality traits
Predictive validity
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Summary:As collegiate cheating is a growing concern across the world, researchers have started to explore personality traits for a better understanding of why students engage in such behavior. Whilst prior studies investigated the relationship between personality and general academic dishonesty criteria (viz., counter-academic behavior), this study aimed to provide a deeper understanding of how narrow facets of honesty-humility (i.e., HEXACO Personality Inventory) predict both general and specific academic dishonest behavior. Results from our study of 308 university students replicated prior findings in that the narrow facet, fairness, was the best predictor of broad counter-academic behavior. However, our data revealed that greed avoidance predicted a more specific form of academic dishonest behavior, namely collegiate cheating. Furthermore, narrow facets of honesty-humility show incremental predictive validity above and beyond the global trait when explaining variance in both general and specific self-reported measures. •Narrow facets showed incremental predictive validity over the broad honesty-humility trait.•Fairness predicted counter-academic behavior.•Greed avoidance predicted collegiate cheating.
ISSN:0191-8869
1873-3549
DOI:10.1016/j.paid.2017.11.006