This is the first in a two-part series on honesty.
Why is cheating on the rise and what should I do about it?
The pandemic has been incredibly stressful. Does this make it more forgivable when students cheat? Here鈥檚 something I wrote recently about the topic for as a :
鈥淐ould you describe a time when you told the truth and it hurt you?鈥�
I wish I could say I came up with this interview question. It gets right to the heart of why honesty is often difficult, which is that telling the truth can mean sacrificing something you genuinely want or need.
But I鈥檇 be lying if I did.
The question comes courtesy of journalist David Brooks, who in turn gives to someone he ran into 鈥渨ho hires a lot of people.鈥�
Right now, talking about might feel old-fashioned. The pandemic and its ripple effects of anxiety and stress may seem like a license to prioritize our wants and needs over our oughts and shoulds. In particular, more than a few students and parents I鈥檝e spoken with in recent months told me that until this crisis is behind us, it should be OK to cheat a little on homework and exams. And nationwide, reports of cheating at college since the advent of the pandemic have .
New shows that, indeed, students who report higher levels of distress, sadness, and other negative emotions tend to adopt more generous attitudes toward plagiarism, which in turn predicts actually committing more plagiarism.
In other words, when you鈥檙e feeling besieged, doing the right thing is even harder than usual.
Yet I think it鈥檚 just as important. At Character Lab, we include honesty as a strength of heart, in the same family as kindness and gratitude. Like other strengths of heart, honesty helps us relate to other people in positive ways. But when it comes to forming judgments about other people, research suggests that nothing is more important than moral character.
It is perhaps for this reason that a student I know well went out of her way to show me her transcript from last semester. With pride, she pointed out her statistics grade鈥攚hich was noticeably lower than the others. 鈥淚t was an incredibly hard class,鈥� she explained. 鈥淎nd so many students cheated, working together on the exams even though the professor told us not to. I did my own work. The grade sucks, but I did the right thing.鈥�
顿辞苍鈥檛 underestimate the influence of stress on every aspect of behavior, including honesty. Decisions to do the right thing are more difficult when you feel like you鈥檙e struggling.
Do raise the topic of honesty with the young people in your life. Tell a story about a time when you told the truth and it hurt you鈥攁nd perhaps a time when you failed to be truthful and regretted it. And be honest about being honest. It can be hard to hold fast to our principles鈥攜et imperative that we try.
