University Students' Reasoning about Cheating within Moral Disengagement Mechanisms Framework

Moral disengagement consists of some cognitive mechanisms that people use them to reduce their negative feeling after doing an immoral behavior. Present study has aimed to study the frequencies of the mechanisms in the content of students' reasoning about cheating in exams. Also, it has aimed to study the relationship between the disengagement mechanisms and cheating behavior

Present study was a content analysis study. Population was the students of Salman Farsi University of Kazerun (in Iran). The Sample consisted of 379 students who were selected by convenient sampling. Students responded to an open-ended question about how they evaluate cheating in exams; also, they responded to a Likert scale question about how much they cheat in exams. The responses were examined by content analysis within eight mechanisms of moral disengagement framework and also considering cheating as wrong. To statistical analysis it was used the frequency, percent, chi-Square goodness of fit (χ2) t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), Pearson's correlation and point- biserial correlation.

40.9% of students considered cheating as a wrong behavior; however, 82.7% of students have done it at least once. Among the contents that consider cheating as right, 54.91% corresponded to moral justifications as a mechanism of moral disengagement. Amount of using moral disengagement positively correlated to cheating behavior (r: 0.396). Except the superiority of female students in considering cheating as incorrect, there were not any differences based on gender or years of education in any of the variable.

It seems that cheating is not considered as immoral behavior in the reasoning of the students. It is suggested that using some proceedings to reduce moral disengagement and also illuminate the cheating as immoral in formal and informal curriculum of the universities