A few weeks ago, a new cheating scandal erupted at the University of Florida as 97 students in a 250-person course (39%) in Computer Science & Engineering were caught cheating on an online exam. Students were given the option to come clean before the presentation of evidence, in which case they faced reduced penalties. One student complained because she cheated in a way that students in the past had cheated, but she was caught while they were not.
The method of cheating detection, according to the course instructor, was perfect. Hidden markers were included from old exams so that any copy/pasting would result in those hidden markers being included in the student’s exam. These markers could not appear any way other than by copy/pasting. Thus, there may have been more cheaters than were detected, but there were definitely at least this many.
What caught my eye in this story was a comment by a student found by the reporter:
Julie Rothe, an 18-year-old finance and information systems freshman, said she plans to accept responsibility. But she will challenge the penalty, she said, because students cheated in years past.
“I’m really angry at the fact that students got away with this in earlier semesters,” she said. “We are taking the hit, and I believe that is unfair.”
According to a commenter, the online format was only adopted last semester, so this student’s premise is probably false anyway. But it still offers an intriguing anecdote in which to explore how people perceive “fairness” in decision-making.
In I/O Psychology, we talk about fairness in terms of organizational justice theory. This theory poses three types of justice:
- Distributive justice: rewards/punishments are distributed fairly
- Procedural justice: the process by which rewards/punishments are distributed is fair
- Interactional justice: adequate information about reward/punishment distribution is provided respectfully
As instructors, we think primarily about distributive justice. In this case, the students were caught cheating and they should be punished accordingly – end of story. To an academic, cheating is a break of the most sacred trust between students and faculty: that student only represent their own work as their own. Violation of this trust should result in substantial penalties, up to and including expulsion, because the transgression is so extreme.
But to the student interviewed, this is not the primary concern. Instead, she is concerned with how the decision was made in the past. Although her facts may not be correct, we can summarize her thinking with, “In the past, students weren’t penalized for doing what I did. Therefore, this is unfair.” This is a judgment about procedural justice. Although she accepts responsibility for being caught, she believes that because cheater detection in the past was not like this, she should not be penalized severely.
Which is more valid? Ultimately, the punishment itself is what should be judged as fair or unfair, so the student’s position is not tenable. But we can still appreciate the “logic” of her position. It highlights that in organizational settings, it is perceptions of fairness that ultimately affect employee behavior and attitudes more so than it is the actual fairness of decisions.
New research by Crede, Harms, Niehorster and Gaye-Valentine1 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology investigates the impact of using abbreviated personality measures. Short answer: don’t do it.
In their study, the researchers surveyed 437 employed people (collected via StudyResponse) and 395 undergraduates. Personality was assessed with common 1-item, 2-item, 4-item, 8-item, 6-item, and 8-item measures, along with a variety of outcomes, including job performance, GPA, stress, and health behaviors.
Almost universally, longer measures resulted in higher correlations with outcomes. For example, Conscientiousness predicted Job Task Performance .6 with the 8-item measure (Saucier, in this case), with correlations as low as .2 with 1-item measures.
This is most critical for personality researchers who often rely on incremental variance found over the Big Five to provide evidence of a new, unique personality trait. For example, they use a single-item measure and their new measure in a survey study, find new variance in job performance or life satisfaction using their new measure over the Big Five, and declare that they have found a new, useful personality trait. This study suggests that evidence for many such traits may be fallacious; instead, the incremental variance found is better explained by the lack of a reasonable multi-item personality trait for comparison.
The authors also find that the use of abbreviated personality measures increases both Type I and Type II statistical conclusion errors. Single-item measures are especially risky. Although the shortened length of the scales is attractive from a practical perspective, this is completely empirically unjustified – the loss of validity is simply not worth it.
All of this together suggests a very simple decision rule: don’t use abbreviated personality measures.
- Credé, M., Harms, P., Niehorster, S., & Gaye-Valentine, A. (2012). An evaluation of the consequences of using short measures of the Big Five personality traits. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 102 (4), 874-888 DOI: 10.1037/a0027403 [↩]
Research recently published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking1 reveals that on average, people perceive Facebook to negatively affect other people, but do not believe themselves to be affected in the same way.
To examine this, the researchers provided an anonymous survey to 357 undergraduates. They asked questions about Facebook usage, perceived negative effects toward others and perceived negative effects toward the self. Using paired-samples t-tests, they found that participants believed the privacy of others was reduced due to Facebook use, but did not perceive their own privacy to be affected as much. They also perceived later job opportunities for other people to be decreased due to a Facebook use, but did not perceive a decrease in opportunities for themselves. There was no difference between perceptions about negative effects on self and others for personal relationships.
This does not suffer from many of the usual limitations of survey research because we are explicitly interested in user perceptions. It doesn’t really matter if this captures their actual Facebook usage or not. The study aims to capture people’s beliefs, and that’s exactly what it does.
The researcher use this to support the presence of a third-person effect (TPE) on Facebook. The third-person effect theoretical framework argues that people tend to view themselves as being immune to the negative effects of media, which traditionally includes forces like television, radio, film, and video games, but still believe others to be negatively affected by these media. This stems from feelings of “biased optimism” – that you have sufficient control over yourself to avoid negative effects, but others don’t. It seems Facebook falls into this paradigm just as easily – or perhaps it’s the Lake Wobegon Effect!
- Paradise, A., & Sullivan, M. (2012). (In)visible threats? The third-person effect in perceptions of the influence of Facebook Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 15 (1), 55-60 DOI: 10.1089/cyber.2011.0054 [↩]