Gender, Social Bond, and Academic Cheating in Japan*

Abstract

There is evidence that females are less likely to cheat than males on college campuses. A frequently offered but still untested explanation is that females, with a stronger sense of responsibility for the maintenance of social relationships, tend to develop a stronger bond to a conventional society—a key explanatory concept in Hirschi’s (1969) social control theory. With academic cheating as the dependent variable, we test the hypotheses that the four elements of social bond are the intervening variables linking gender to such dishonesty among Japanese students who, due to their stronger orientation toward masculinity on Hofstede’s (1980) scale of gender role separation, are subject to more gender distinct socialization, leading to greater gender differences in the strength of social bond than those previously reported in the United States. The analysis provides rather limited support for the theory, most of which is due to the stronger belief in the legitimacy of societal rules among the females.

Does Bad Company Corrupt Good Morals? Social Bonding and Academic Cheating among French and Chinese Teens

“…Negative social influence (Brown et al 2005;Rose et al 1992) helps us explain why popular French teens, popular girls, in particular, engage in cheating-bad company corrupts good morals. Results partially support the literature (Kobayashi and Fukushima 2012).…”

“…2013). Most studies investigate individuals from one single country (Allmon et al 2000), such as, Canada (Widelman 2009), China (Ma et al 2013), Hungary (Orosz et al 2013, Japan (Kobayashi and Fukushima 2012), South Korea (Park et al 2013), UK (Kirland 2009), and the US (Gino and Wiltermuth 2014;Premeaux 2010), with some exceptions (Pascual-Ezama et al 2015;Salter et al 2001;Tang et al 2011Tang et al , 2015. In this study, we incorporate social bonding theory.…”

“…Belief in legitimacy of the law is a strong constraint to deviant behaviors, specifically academic cheating, stronger than the other elements of social bonds (Kobayashi 2011;Kobayashi and Fukushima 2012). For that reason, we expect a negative relationship between adolescents' beliefs in the legitimacy of the law or normative system in a society and academic cheating.…”

“…Among four social bonds, only attachment and belief components predict academic cheating, whereas commitment and involvement exhibit little significant influence on cheating (Michaels and Miethe 1989). Significant positive relationships between social bonds and cheating exist among Japanese females, but not among Japanese males (Kobayashi and Fukushima 2012). There is a dearth of empirical research on social bonds and academic cheating due to the lack of cross-disciplinary research by scholars in sociology and behavioral ethics.…”

Predicting Academic Dishonesty on National Examinations: The Roles of Gender, Previous Performance, Examination Center Change, City Change, and Region Change

“…Studies focused on gender effects reported that men are more likely to commit academic dishonesty acts compared to women (e.g., Aiken, A c c e p t e d M a n u s c r i p t 8 1991; Davis, Grover, Becker, & McGregor, 1992;Kobayashi & Fukushima, 2012;Ward, 1986), a finding that has been replicated not only with American students, but also with Canadian (Genereux & McLeod, 1995), Japanese (Kobayashi & Fukushima, 2012), Taiwanese (Lin & Wen, 2007), and Arab (Ai-Qaisy, 2008) college students. Others, on the other hand, failed to reveal any gender differences (e.g., Baird, 1980;Haines, Diekhoff, LaBeff, & Clark, 1986;Whitley, Nelson, & Jones, 1999).…”