Who cheats? Adolescents’ background characteristics and dishonest behavior : a comprehensive literature review and insights from two consecutive surveys

adolescents, dishonest behavior, cheating, individual background characteristics, die-under-the-cup task, experiment

Abstract

A growing body of experimental literature investigates how student-level background characteristics are associated with dishonest behavior in early adolescence. However, results from prior studies are mixed. To revisit earlier findings, we conducted a comprehensive literature review and executed two consecutive, large-scale, incentivized surveys in Hungarian primary schools involving the same students in different academic years. We focused on eight student-level background characteristics: social status, cognitive ability, grade point average, disruptive school behavior, patience, age, altruism, and gender. Our analysis revealed no consistent patterns between students’ background characteristics and dishonest behavior. This finding aligns with the results of our detailed literature review, which suggests that adolescents’ dishonest behavior was inconsistently associated with their background characteristics in prior scholarship. We conclude that adolescents’ dishonest behavior is much more spontaneous, probably shaped by situational factors, and less predictable than previously thought.