“When Cheating Makes us Think We’re Smart”

I get an email from turnitin.com occasionally that points out new ways to use the website and oftentimes has links to articles having to do with student writing. In the April 20th turnitin email, there was a headline titled “When Cheating Makes us Think We’re Smart.” This caught my attention and I decided to read the post. The article was a blog post written by Nate Kornell, Ph.D. and was published on March 28th, 2011. The blog post details a study by Zoë Chance, Michael I. Norton, Francesca Ginob, and Dan Ariely. The study focused on how individuals interpret and feel about their own cheating. The study had two groups of participants.

Here is the breakdown of how the two groups were different:

“Participants in the control group:
• Took a test.
• Made a prediction about how they'd do on a second test.
• Took a second test.
Participants in the "cheating" group did the same, but during the first test, the answers were printed at the bottom of the test.

• Took a test on which they could cheat
• Made a prediction about how they'd do on a second test.
• Took a second test.”

The study found that the people who were given the opportunity to cheat on the first test, “thought” that they would do better on the second test. These findings were the opposite of what I expected the study to find. The group that was able to cheat made predictions that were “significantly higher than were the control group's. In other words, getting answers right by cheating made people think they were smart.

The authors put it this way:

We find that those who exploit opportunities to cheat on tests are likely to engage in self-deception, interfering that their elevated performance is a sign of intelligence. This short-term psychological benefit of self-deception, however, can come with longer-term costs: when predicting future performance, participants expect to perform equally well—a lack of awareness that persists even when these inflated expectations prove costly.
These results add to ample evidence that people are adept at deceiving themselves” (Kornell).

Even though I don’t think the study was very clear, I still think that this is something interesting to share with students. I plan on sharing this with my English 10 students next week when they need to submit more of their writing to turnitin.com. It is scary to think about how much cheating may actually take place at school. This would just be something to share with students to show them how they really will not get anywhere with cheating.


The blog was written on the “Psychology Today” website and can be found here:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/everybody-is-stupid-except-you/201103/when-cheating-makes-us-think-were-smart?mkt_tok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonv63PZKXonjHpfsX%2B7%2BwoXaag38431UFwdcjKPmjr1YQIT9QhcOuuEwcWGog8yRxZCOGRdYdN6Q%3D%3D

Here is a link to the study if you are curios in checking it out:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2011/03/02/1010658108.abstract