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This paper presents an empirical study of digital plagiarism. Under two experimental conditions, undergraduate writers were guided by different achievement goals to write an essay with or without the copy-and-paste function on a website. The study focused on two possible influences on digital plagiarism, a) instructional goals for writing, and b) the affordances of digital learning environments specifically the availability of a copy-paste function. A 2 × 2 factorial design was used to analyze the effects of these contextual variables on digital plagiarism. Results indicated that overall 79.5% of the writers engaged in digital plagiarism. There was a significant interaction in which instructional performance goals lead to more plagiarism when copy-paste is available. Findings highlight individual-environment interactions, including a writer's adopted goals for writing as set by writing prompt instructions (learning goals vs. performance goals) and the affordances of the writing environment including the ease of copy-paste or precautions taken to protect text (such as using jpegs of text). Rather than being principally directed by student's beliefs prior to, or when they begin a writing task, the on-the-fly interactions they have during the writing task may best explain their tendency toward plagiarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]