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Do exhausted primary school students cheat more? A randomized field experiment

Keller, Tamás and Kiss, Hubert János (2021) Do exhausted primary school students cheat more? A randomized field experiment. Plos One, 16 (12). DOI https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260141

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260141


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.

Item Type:Article
Subjects:Education
Sociology
Funders:NKFIH, János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, U´NKP
Projects:K 135766, BO/00569/21/9
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260141
ID Code:7228
Deposited By: MTMT SWORD
Deposited On:01 Mar 2022 11:04
Last Modified:01 Mar 2022 11:04

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