1. Do exhausted primary school students cheat more? A randomized field experiment
- Author
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Tamás Keller and Hubert Janos Kiss
- Subjects
Social Cognition ,Questionnaires ,Male ,Applied psychology ,Social Sciences ,Surveys ,Task (project management) ,Cognition ,Mathematical and Statistical Techniques ,Sociology ,Academic Performance ,Psychology ,Child ,Multidisciplinary ,Schools ,Scope (project management) ,Statistics ,Metaanalysis ,Professions ,Research Design ,Physical Sciences ,Medicine ,Female ,Research Article ,Deception ,Social Psychology ,Randomized experiment ,Science ,Cheating ,Decision Making ,Research and Analysis Methods ,Education ,Self-Control ,Humans ,Scientific debate ,Statistical Methods ,Students ,Behavior ,Survey Research ,Cognitive Psychology ,Biology and Life Sciences ,Teachers ,Altruistic Behavior ,Prosocial Behavior ,People and Places ,Cognitive Science ,Population Groupings ,Mathematics ,Neuroscience - Abstract
Motivated by the two-decade-long scientific debate over the existence of the ego-depletion effect, our paper contributes to exploring the scope conditions of ego-depletion theory. Specifically, in a randomized experiment, we depleted students’ self-control with a cognitively demanding task that required students’ effort. We measured the effect of depleted self-control on a subsequent task that required self-control to not engage in fraudulent cheating behavior—measured with an incentivized dice-roll task—and tested ego-depletion in a large-scale preregistered field experiment that was similar to real-life situations. We hypothesized that treated students would cheat more. The data confirms the hypothesis and provides causal evidence of the ego-depletion effect. Our results provide new insights into the scope conditions of ego-depletion theory, contribute methodological information for future research, and offer practical guidance for educational policy.
- Published
- 2021