Differential effects of honesty-humility and descriptive social norms across the seriousness dimension of academic dishonesty

Academic dishonesty hinders the accurate evaluation of student learning in higher education. Previous research indicates that both Honesty-Humility and descriptive social norms predict dishonest behavior. Here, we investigated the role of seriousness-the moral weight of dishonest acts-as an underlying dimension of academic dishonesty which can influence the predictive quality of both determinants. We demonstrate that Honesty-Humility has a stronger negative association with serious behaviors, whereas descriptive social norms show a stronger positive association with non-serious behaviors. We investigated a sample of 856 German university students who completed two surveys during a semester in a nationwide study. Using multiple methodologies (i.e. cross-validation with an independent sample, multidimensional scaling, cross-validation with judgments of perceived seriousness), we show that seriousness can be validly measured by assessing the self-reported prevalence of behaviors. This measurement approach is valuable as it does not require additional effort by the researcher. As predicted, structural equation modeling showed that Honesty-Humility was more strongly associated with serious behaviors, while descriptive social norms were more strongly associated with non-serious behaviors. Our findings underscore the theoretical significance of seriousness as a fundamental dimension of academic dishonesty, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of this broad construct. Furthermore, we discuss how recognition of seriousness of dishonest behaviors can inform the development of more targeted and potentially more effective prevention strategies in higher education contexts.