A Canary Alive: What Cheating Reveals About Morality and Its Development

Reports of academic cheating trigger fears of moral decay. This inference, that cheating is a dying canary in the coal mine of morality, assumes that youth who cheat lack genuine, moral concerns with honesty and integrity. This article proposes an alternative perspective on cheating and dishonesty. We propose that cheating and other forms of dishonesty result from (1) misperceptions of what constitutes cheating, (2) evaluations that cheating or lying is okay under exceptional circumstances, and (3) prioritization of non-integrity actions during conflict. Each of these three steps—perceptions, evaluations, and action-selections—show both situational and developmental variability. From this perspective, research on cheating reveals moral engagement, not moral disengagement: Developmental and psychological research shows that, far from being a dying canary, cheating reveals the pervasive role of morality in decision-making

Adults’ responses to young children’s transgressions: A new method for understanding everyday social interactions

In the current research, we examined adult responses to recordings of everyday transgressions committed by young children. This research adopted a new method for assessing adults’ interpretations, evaluations, and proposed interventions in response to children’s transgressions

Are preschoolers expected to learn difficult science constructs? A content analysis of U.S. standards

In this project, we performed a content analysis of the preschool science standards for U.S. states to assess the extent to which preschoolers are expected to learn abstract constructs

"Unfair but Necessary?" Engineering Students' Reasoning about Cheating

Talk presentation on data collected from surveys and interviews with engineering students on academic misconduct and their perspectives on integrity. Presented at the 2021 Symposium for Undergraduate Research at UC Santa Cruz. Received first-place for talk presentations

Teaching the what, why, and how of academic integrity: Naturalistic evidence from college classrooms

The ways in which instructors discuss (or do not discuss) academic integrity are a crucial part of students’ education. Using naturalistic observations of discussions about academic integrity in STEM classes, the present research assesses current teaching practices, highlights potential gaps in these approaches, and points to areas for further development of educational strategies. This OSF project provides supplementary materials and resources for the research project

Everyday Messages About Cheating From Teachers and Students: An Observational Study

Fostering a culture of academic integrity in secondary schools is a critical issue for moral development in emerging adulthood, as cheating threatens fairness, learning, and student success. Past research on cheating has mainly relied on self-report surveys with limited response options. The present study bridges this gap by employing naturalistic observations of high school classroom

PURC 2022 - "A Nationwide Analysis of Academic Integrity Policies"

Poster presented at the 2022 Psychology Undergraduate Research Conference (PURC) at UCLA

Don't be a rat: An investigation of the taboo against reporting other students for cheating

Supplementary online materials for a two-study project examining how emerging adults and teens reason, evaluate, and make decisions about reporting others' dishonest

Transparency and Validity in Coding Open-Ended Data for Quantitative Analysis

Open-ended data are rich sources of information in psychological research, but reporting practices differ substantially. Here, we assess current reporting practices for quantitative coding of open-ended data, provide strategies for making it more valid and reliable, and investigate questionable research practices in this area. First, we systematically examined articles in four top psychology journals and found that 21% included open-ended data coded by humans. However, only 36% of these reported sufficient details about the coding process. We propose guidelines for transparently reporting on the quantitative coding of open-ended data, informed by concerns with replicability, content validity, and statistical validity. We identify several practices that researchers can share information about, such as how units of analysis and categories were determined, whether there was a gold-standard coder, whether the test phase was masked and pre-determined, and whether there were multiple test-phases. Our data simulations indicate that a common statistic for testing reliability on open-ended data, Cohen’s kappa (κ), can become inflated when researchers use repeated test phases and manipulate categories such as by including a missing data category. To facilitate transparent and valid coding of open-ended data, we provide a pre-registration template that can be adapted for different types of studies