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Presents a forum on cheating in academic institutions. Responses of professors from different institutions on the case; Suggestions on the mitigation of the dilemma; Research on academic dishonesty.

SUMMARY Behaving consistently with one's existing attitudes has sometimes been found to produce self-perception effects (Ss later express greater involvement with relevant beliefs as behavioral freedom increases) and other times self-presentational, reactance effects (Ss later express greater involvement as behavioral freedom decreases). To test hypotheses about when these effects occur, 208 American male and female undergraduates committed themselves to argue for a consonant issue under conditions when they (a) had high or Low choice prior to the behavior; (b) had high or low responsibility for a potential failure on the task; and (c) were highly, moderately, or not at all anonymous. Contrary to predictions, the manipulations did not affect two direct measures of attitudes toward the issue. However, interactions on other measures indicated that when Ss were moderately anonymous and highly responsible, those in the high as compared to low choice condition took greater personal responsibility, desired to be more persuasive, and were more extreme toward an unrelated social issue. These results suggest a partial self-perception effect and raise questions about the generalizability of previous findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Reactions to others' claims of responsibility were investigated to determine whether members of a group who attempt to claim extra responsibility for success or deny responsibility for failure are derogated by fellow group members. After receiving success or failure feedback, 34 male and 70 female college students who were members of small groups evaluated the attractiveness of another group member who took more, equal, or less responsibility for the outcome. Results indicated that others who isolate themselves from the group by denying responsibility for group activities are less favorably evaluated than those who allocate responsibility equitably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The causal impact of attributions on academic performance was examined by changing low-scoring students' attributions regarding their poor performances. Initially, when students who were failing a college course identified the cause of the performance, they emphasized external, uncontrollable causes. Because these self-serving attributions could have perpetuated poor performance on subsequent examinations, students in the experimental condition were exposed to information that suggested that grades in college are caused by internal, controllable factors such as effort and motivation. As predicted, on subsequent tests and on the final examination, these students earned higher grades than control students who received no attributional information. These findings lend support to an attributional model of academic achievement and also suggest that educational interventions that shift attributions away from a self-serving pattern to a performance-facilitating pattern may improve academic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studied the relationship between empathy skills, attending, listening and reflecting, and empathic perspective-taking by examining actor-observer differences in attributions. While early studies clearly demonstrated that actors tend to focus on situational factors when explaining their actions while observers emphasize the causal impact of personal forces on behavior, several recent studies have shown that this attributional tendency is minimized if attributors empathize with actors. Rather than overtly manipulating empathic orientation by asking subjects to "imagine" how the actor feels, the present study manipulated skills that should be linked to empathy. Approximately one-half of the participants had just completed a short structured group exercise in which they were trained to attend, to listen and to reflect content and feelings, while the remaining untrained subjects served as a control. In addition, the effects of focus of attention were controlled by telling subjects to focus on one of the actors in the dyad, even though both participants were clearly visible.

In order to determine when ethical ideology influences judgments of morality, individuals who endorsed an absolutist, exceptionist, subjectivist, or situationist ideology morally evaluated an actor linked, at varying levels of responsibility, to positive or negative outcomes. As predicted, absolutists judged the actor more harshly than exceptionists, but only when the described actor has foreseen or intended to produce a highly negative consequence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The difficulties in performing a crucial experiment in social psychology are addressed taking philosophical and epistemo logical issues into account. While previous discussions have pro posed that present social psychological theories and methods pre vent such tests, closer analysis indicates that this inability is not unique to social psychology, but is an aspect of any scienti fic inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents information on a study that examines the effects of performance, task importance, and future testing on attributions made after completing a cooperative group task. In order to determine if the performance feedback was effective in generating differences in perceptions of success and failure, subjects were asked to rate how well their group performed on the task, how satisfied they were with the performance of their group, and how well they personally performed on the task. The difference between each subject's rating of personal performance and group performance was calculated for the present data and an analysis of variance was performed on this measure of relative performance. The results demonstrated a consistent effect of group success versus failure on attributions. As compared to subjects in failing groups, subjects in successful groups attributed more responsibility to sell, average group member, and group as a whole, and attributed the cause of the performance more to personal ability and less to internal constraints, distractions in the situation, and task difficulty.

A self-presentational interpretation of persuasibility was investigated by measuring American college students' (48 males and 50 females) attitudes both before and after a direct persuasion attempt. Reports of attitude change supported Eagly's explanation of sex differences in persuasibility, since females—when the need to manage impressions was high—made greater use of opinion conformity in their self-presentations, while males' self-presentations included instances of opinion confirmity, independence, and dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between ethical ideology and moral behavior was investigated in two studies by tempting American college students (19 males and 61 females) to cheat on a test administered in a laboratory setting. Overall, students who adopted different ethical ideologies, as assessed by the 2 (relativistic vs nonrelativistic moral outlook) by 2 (idealistic vs pragmatic values) classification scheme of the Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ) behaved similarly. However, questionnaire ratings indicated (a) selfdevaluation was most pronounced among absolutists (nonrelativistic and idealistic); (b) exceptionists (nonrelativistic and pragmatic) reported increased happiness the more they cheated; (c) situationists' (relativistic and idealistic) self-ratings were not clearly related to the morality of their actions; and (d) subjectivists (relativistic and pragmatic) showed signs of fear of detection. Combined with previous data, these findings suggest variations in ethical ideology may predict individual differences in moral judgment, but not individual differences in moral behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A field study questionnaire examined the attributional patterns of males and females (N = 153 ages 11 to 58) who previously had won or lost tennis matches. Consistent with laboratory findings of attributional egocentrism, winning as compared to losing Ss attributed their performance more to internal facilitating factors (personal effort and ability) and less to internal debilitating factors (e.g., lack of practice). Sex differences indicated females took greater personal responsibility for a win than a loss, but also denied total responsibility' by emphasizing the importance of luck more after a win than loss, suggesting a "fear of success" conflict. MaIes, on the other hand. employed less direct modes to achieve accountability for success and unaccountability for failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]