The Transmission of Dishonesty: Teacher-Student Interactions in Homogeneous and Diverse Communities

Joint with: Moses Shayo.

Speaker's homepage: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/vlavy

Abstract: This paper studies the transmission of dishonesty from teachers to students, using detailed administrative data that allows us to track teacher dishonest behavior and subsequent student cheating in high-stakes exams. Understanding how teacher dishonesty influences student behavior is important for standard educational outcomes and broader social issues related to trust and ethical behavior. As role models, teachers are widely believed to shape their students' ethical standards and academic integrity. We examine how different forms of teacher dishonesty—beneficial and harmful to students—affect students' likelihood of cheating. Our primary analysis exploits within-student variation in exposure to different teachers, thus overcoming any potential correlations between the student (or the class or the school) characteristics and the likelihood of cheating or being caught. Furthermore, we use variation in teacher dishonest behavior in the preceding year, thus alleviating concerns about reverse causality. Our findings suggest that when teachers engage in dishonesty that is plausibly perceived as detrimental to the students- specifically giving students exceptionally low internal grades- there is a strong tendency for students to engage in dishonest behavior themselves, as revealed by the likelihood of cheating in the respective external exam. Conversely, when teachers are dishonest in ways that benefit their students, our analysis reveals a nuanced response. Students tend to cheat less in homogeneous, tight-knit, kin-based communities, consistent with reciprocal norms or gift-exchange dynamics. Notably, this response is particularly prevalent in an ethnic minority community, where strong social norms and communal values may especially influence. Indeed, in tight-knit communities, where social bonds are stronger, and expectations of reciprocity are clearer, students might be less inclined to cheat in response to beneficial teacher dishonesty, as they may perceive the dishonest act as part of a larger social contract. In contrast, in heterogeneous communities, the effect of beneficial dishonest behavior is qualitatively similar to detrimental dishonest behavior, leading to more student cheating. This is consistent with the idea that heterogeneous societies are less cohesive and reciprocal behavior is less prevalent. The results thus suggest an important role for community context in shaping moral behavior, echoing findings from cultural economics.