An experimental test on the causal effect of moral self-concept on university students’ cheating behavior – pre-registration of a study design

We pre-register a large-scale experiment to test the direct causal effect of moral self-concept on fraudulent behavior (cheating). We follow the theoretical considerations of self-concept maintenance theory [SCMT], which describes mechanisms that allow people to enjoy the benefits of cheating and still maintain a positive self-concept. Following the logic of SCMT’s attention-to-standards mechanism, we hypothesize that if people are mindful of their moral standards, they cheat less since cheating triggers downgrading of people’s moral self-concept, which they aim to avoid. We will measure students’ cheating using the die-under-the-cup task. We employ a narrow definition of moral self-concept, which rests on the self-reported honesty that we externally induce by a random intervention. Our light-touch pre-tested intervention consists of an affirmation message that empowers students’ moral self-concept. Under the assumption that the intervention affects the outcome only via self-concept, we interpret the intervention as an instrumental variable for the causal effect of self-reported honesty. Therefore, we can directly test the hypothesized negative causal effect between self-concept and cheating that prior research has assessed through indirect and non-causal mediation analysis. Confirmed hypotheses will indicate that moral self-concept has a direct negative effect on cheating. Falsified hypotheses will suggest that our narrowly defined, externally induced, and self-reported moral self-concept does not prevent people from cheating. Thus, researchers should find out different experimental settings to explore the causal effect of moral self-concept on fraudulent behavior within the framework of SCMT.