One need not be a philosopher or psychologist to understand that moral judgment is not a guarantee of moral action. There is often a divide between that which we say we ought do—or not do—and that which we do. Many students, for example, cheat, even when they believe it is wrong to do so (e.g., Anderman et al., 1998; Jordan, 2001; Stephens and Nicholson, 2008). This divide between belief and behavior has been rich theoretical ground among philosophers for millennia and psychologists of the past century. Among the former it has been called the “Thought/Action problem” (Locke, 1983) and the “judgment-action gap” among the latter (Blasi, 1980). In either case, the problem is one of explaining the oft-observed insufficiency of moral judgment to produce moral action; and the questions to be answered concern identifying and explaining the psychological, social, and/or situational factors that either exacerbate or help bridge the divide.

Toward this end, numerous theories of ethical decision-making and moral functioning have been proffered (e.g., Sykes and Matza, 1957; Festinger, 1962; Fishbein and Ajzen, 1972; Blasi, 1980, 1983, 1984; Kohlberg and Candee, 1984; Bandura, 1986; Rest, 1986; Beck and Ajzen, 1991; Weiner, 1995; Rest et al., 1999; Bergman, 2002; Roberts et al., 2017). Albeit operationalized with different constructs, motivation and self-regulation are central to all theories in explaining or bridging the gap between moral cognition and action. The present study explores the power of some of the most prominent models in explaining the epidemic of academic dishonesty among adolescents. More precisely, the present paper tests the extent to which responsibility judgments (Kohlberg and Candee, 1984) or moral obligation (Beck and Ajzen, 1991) and mechanisms of moral disengagement (Bandura, 1986, 1990, 1999) or techniques of neutralization (Sykes and Matza, 1957) mediate the relationship between high school students' moral judgment and action related to academic dishonesty.

In the field of moral psychology, Rest's (Rest, 1986; Rest et al., 1999) Four-Component Model of (FCM) of moral functioning is among the most widely known. As a student of Lawrence Kohlberg, and his cognitive-structural theory of moral development (Kohlberg, 1969, 1984), Rest was familiar with the judgment-action gap and developed the FCM to address it. The FCM postulates that effective moral functioning involves the integrated use of four processes: sensitivity, judgment, motivation, and action. Essentially, when immersed in a situation involving moral values or principles, one must be not only aware of the moral values or principles at stake, and render a judgment (ideally rooted in principled reasoning) concerning the what one should do, we must also—if the judgment rendered is to be enacted—be moved to act, and to regulate our thoughts, emotions, and movements in pursuit of the chosen course. Moreover, we often must overcome temptations, competing goals or desires, and occasionally barriers and obstacles, that would have us desist or follow a different (less righteous) path.

Two theoretical suppositions of the FCM are important to the present investigation. First, and most plainly, effective moral or ethical functioning involves many processes or components, each with its own purposes and skills (perceptual, cognitive, affective, and behavioral). Judgment is but one of them, and, by itself, no guarantee of moral action; necessary, but insufficient. Second, effective moral or ethical functioning is effortful, even if not always consciously so. It requires motivation and self-regulation to move our moral judgment to moral action: We must not only know the good, we must also be moved to act and exercise the self-control and ego-strength needed to do the good (or refrain from doing the bad). The latter supposition, morality as effortful, is well described in theory of deliberate honesty (Bereby-Meyer and Shalvi, 2015). Adopting a dual process model (see Kahneman, 2011) to explain dishonesty, Bereby-Meyer and Shalvi posit that “when lying serves self-interest, that is, when lying is tempting, honesty may require deliberation” (p. 195). In brief, in the face of temptation to gain personal advantage, system 2 (deliberative—slow with high cognitive load) processes are required to override system 1 (intuitive—fast and automatic) processes; that honesty may not be our “default response” and that being so requires self-control and ego-strength.

Numerous empirical studies have lent support to both suppositions. With respect to the multi-component nature of moral functioning, several studies have shown that other psychological processes (beyond reasoning and judgment) are implicated in academic dishonesty (Malinowski and Smith, 1985; Beck and Ajzen, 1991; Diekhoff et al., 1996; Jordan, 2001; Hunt and Vitell, 2006; Moores and Chang, 2006; Anderman and Murdock, 2007; Detert et al., 2008; Murdock et al., 2008; Vohs and Schooler, 2008; Shu et al., 2011; Olafson et al., 2012; Fosgaard et al., 2013; Motro et al., 2016). For example, in their widely-cited study using the theory of planned behavior, Beck and Ajzen (1991) showed that motivational factors (i.e., perceived moral obligation) and self-regulatory beliefs (i.e., perceived behavioral control) explained significant additional variance (beyond attitudes) in predicting both intentions to cheat and engagement in cheating.

In addition to psychological research, scores of studies from the field of neuroscience have also provided evidence for the multi-component and effortful nature of moral functioning (for meta-analyses, see Sevinc and Spreng, 2014; Eres et al., 2017; Han, 2017). For example, in their a meta-analysis of 40 fMRI studies, Sevinc and Spreng (2014) found that nearly a dozen regions of the brain are activated during both “active moral judgment tasks” (i.e., tasks requiring participants to render and declare a judgment) and “passive tasks” (i.e., tasks where no deliberation or explicit judgment was required, only the viewing a stimulus that contained either morally-laden or neutral content). However, while both types of tasks call on many of the same brain regions, compared to passive tasks, engagement in active moral judgment tasks demonstrated more reliable activity in the superior and anterior regions of temporoparietal junction (TPJ), angular gyrus, temporal pole, and left medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). Whereas compared to active tasks, passive tasks more reliably activated the lingual gyrus, left amygdala and right MPFC. In short, though all moral tasks require activation in several brain regions, more demanding tasks require greater use of regions associated with deliberative, effortful thinking (System 2) and passive tasks greater use of automatic, unconscious processing (System 1) (e.g., Greene et al., 2001; Greene and Haidt, 2002).

These neuroscience studies offer an important reminder to psychologists and other researchers studying moral functioning, particularly as it relates to academic dishonesty. That is, while neuroscientists tend to elicit response (location and intensity of brain activity) by presenting subjects (at full attention enveloped in an fMRI machine) with stimuli (verbal and/or visual) that are unambiguously moral (e.g., the classic trolley dilemma involving life-and-death decisions), the latter tend to elicit response (latent attitudes as expressed by ticks on a Likert-type scale) by presenting participants (in classrooms or online) with stimuli (descriptions of behaviors) that may be ambiguous with respect to their morality (e.g., participants may not perceive or believe the behavior in question to be a moral one). The last methodological difference is the most important one. If you're trying assess ethical decision-making or moral functioning, participants must see and process that selected stimuli as morally-relevant; else you're not activating the regions of the brain associated with moral decision-making (e.g., Greene et al., 2001; Greene and Haidt, 2002).

On this point, much of the literature to date on students' beliefs and judgments about academic dishonesty hasn't been unambiguous. Most studies, that is, have assessed students' attitudes toward cheating behaviors with Likert-type scales that measure how much students believe academic dishonesty to be “wrong,” “serious,” or “unacceptable” (e.g., Anderman et al., 1998; Jordan, 2001; Stephens et al., 2007). While these studies have produced clear and consistent results demonstrating significant negative associations between students' attitudes toward cheating and their engagement in it, they do not ask what domain of behavior students' might use to classify or judge academic dishonesty. In short, it's clear students see cheating as “wrong” (to varying degrees depending on the type of behavior; see, e.g., Stephens et al., 2007), but left unclear whether students believe the behaviors to be “morally wrong” (for exceptions, see Murdock et al., 2004; McDonald et al., 2014).

In one of the few exceptions, McDonald et al. (2014) adopt social domain theory (SDT) to investigate how adolescent peers discuss social dilemmas, including one (among six) on academic dishonesty (i.e., looking at answers to a test left on the teacher's desk). SDT (Turiel, 1983; Nucci, 2001; Smetana, 2006) posits that when making social judgments, individuals consider information and issues from three distinct (with some intersecting and overlapping) domains of social knowledge: (1) personal, which includes those choices or behaviors regarded as matters of individual autonomy and choice, including those rooted in pragmatic or prudential concerns; (2) conventional, comprising cultural customs and societal rules that prescribe (or proscribe) a set of norms governing individual behavior; and (3) moral, actions that involve issues of justice, fairness, welfare, and rights—actions that one should or should not do, even in the absence of conventions. McDonald et al. (2014) found that while adolescents mention moral reasons more frequently than conventional or personal issues when discussing issues such as a telling on a friend or spanking a child, they were more likely to discuss conventional and pragmatic/prudential concerns when talking about academic dishonesty (or one form of it, and a rather risky one). In short, more research is needed that makes these important domain distinctions when investigating how students perceive, reason through, and judge the myriad types behaviors associated with academic dishonesty (from plagiarizing a few sentences to using unpermitted notes during an exam).

With this mind, the present study involved the use a new instrument designed to assess students' domain judgments of several types of academic dishonesty; one rooted in SDT and guided by others (Kuther and Higgins-D'Alessandro, 2000). Instrument development and validation, however, was not the primary goal of the present study; but necessary to fulfill it. As noted above, primary purpose was to test competing theoretical models of moral functioning that might offer some purchase on understanding the judgment-action gap as it relates to academic dishonesty. Of most relevance to the present study were motivational and self-regulatory variables—responsibility judgments and moral disengagement—that might directly or indirectly affect the relations between judgment and action. As summarized next, both constructs have strong theoretical and empirical basis for being part of the hypothesized four-component model of moral functioning being tested as the benchmark in this study.

As theorized by Kohlberg (Kohlberg, 1984; Kohlberg and Candee, 1984), responsibility judgments are “second-order” judgments concerning one's personal moral duty to act in accord with one's “first-order” deontic choices (i.e., judgments concerning the right or just course of action to pursue in the face of a moral dilemma). These responsibility judgments produce a sense of personal accountability to “follow through” and “perform the right action” (Kohlberg and Candee, 1984, p. 57). Using related terminology, other theorists have also written about the importance of moral obligation (Beck and Ajzen, 1991) or judgments of responsibility (Weiner, 1995) in motivating and regulating moral behavior, and empirical research has consistently shown negative associations between these second-order judgments and academic dishonesty (e.g., Beck and Ajzen, 1991; Carpenter et al., 2004; Harding et al., 2007; Stephens et al., 2007; Murdock et al., 2008; Alleyne and Phillips, 2011). In the present study, responsibility judgments are posited to mediate the relations between first-order judgments and cheating behavior.

Kohlberg and Candee (1984) also recognized that ego controls and other non-moral skills were needed for moral judgment (deontic and responsibility) to become moral action. As Blasi (1983) described it, “Since a judgment of responsibility concerns the necessary relation between agent and action, not to act according to one's judgment should be perceived as a substantial inconsistency, as a fracture within the very core of the self, unless neutralizing devices are put into operation” (p. 201; emphasis added). These “neutralizing devices” have a rich theoretical history in psychology, as ego defense mechanisms (Freud, 1936/1993; Freud and Strachey, 1989), and in sociology, as techniques of neutralization (Sykes and Matza, 1957). More recently, Bandura (1986, 1990, 1999) has called them mechanisms of moral disengagement. Despite the myriad labels, the psychological purpose is the same: to protect one from self-recrimination for immoral (in)action by obscuring or denying one's personal responsibility for (in)action.

As further described in Bandura's (1991) social cognitive theory of self-regulation, human behavior is a complex product of mechanisms and subfunctions. The latter include the monitoring of one's behavior, judging it in relation to personal standards and those of others, and affective self-reactions to that conduct. When activated these self-regulatory subfunctions work together to produce behavior consistent with judgments and the standards undergirding them. However, Bandura (1986, 1999) further argued that moral self-regulation can be selectively deactivated, and proposed a set of eight mechanisms of moral disengagement that enable this deactivation process (e.g., euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, disregarding or distorting the consequences, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, attribution of blame, dehumanization, and moral justification).

Empirical research has demonstrated a strong positive associations between moral disengagement (or neutralization, as the construct has been operationalized in some studies) and academic dishonesty: as former increases, so too does the latter (e.g., Haines et al., 1986; LaBeff et al., 1990; McCabe, 1992; Diekhoff et al., 1996; Cava, 2000; Stephens and Gehlbach, 2007; Stephens et al., 2007; Zito and Mcquillan, 2010; Farnese et al., 2011; Shu et al., 2011; Gabbiadini et al., 2013). McCabe (1992), for example, found that displacement of responsibility was the most prevalent mechanism employed by undergraduates: 61% of those that reported cheating rationalized their behavior by blaming others and/or some aspect of the situational context. Similarly, Evans and Craig (1990) found that displacement of responsibility to the teacher was most common among college-bound and high-achieving high school students.

Results from the confirmatory factor analysis are reported first, followed by the descriptive statistics of and bivariate correlations of the four latent factors. Subsequently, results pertaining to each of the five hypotheses are described.

The present investigation was guided by three purposes aimed at measuring moral judgment and its relations to academic dishonesty. Each purpose was itself guided by a set of research questions and hypotheses. Overall, as summarized in Table 5, results offered partial support for the hypotheses. The findings are discussed in further detail below.

The first purpose of this study was to assess students' judgments related to academic dishonesty and to do so with a new instrument based on social domain theory. This instrument asked participants to classify six examples academic dishonesty, and H1 posited that most participants would judge the actions assessed to be matters of social convention (e.g., “Wrong because it's against societal laws, rules or customs”) rather than morally wrong (“Wrong regardless of laws or rules”). In fact, with only two exceptions, the majority of participants the behaviors listed to be morally wrong. As expected, very few participants judged the behaviors to be a personal choice. Similarly, support for H2 was also mixed. As expected, compared to unpermitted collaboration, more participants judged the three test cheating behaviors to be morally wrong; however, and unexpectedly, most participants also judged the copying of homework to be morally wrong. In short, the vast majority (approximately 84–98%) of participants believed all six behaviors to be wrong—either as a violation of rules or moral principle—and test or exam cheating more as morally wrong.

The second purpose of the present study was to explore the associations between students' judgments and actions related to academic dishonesty. H3 predicted that students' who judged behaviors to be morally wrong reported significantly lower rates of engagement in that behavior compared to students who judged the behavior to be a personal choice, but not social convention (as also predicted). However, though not statistically significant, those who judged the action to be morally wrong reported the lower rates of engagement in all types of academic dishonesty. This pattern of findings comports with the previous research which has shown significant negative associations between cheating and the extent to which students believe it to be wrong, unacceptable, or unjustifiable (e.g., Anderman et al., 1998; Jordan, 2001; Murdock et al., 2004; Stephens et al., 2007).

The third and final purpose of this study was to test several prominent theoretical models of moral functioning, and offered a hypothesized four-component model that positioned moral motivation and self-regulation as mediators of the relations between moral judgment and academic dishonesty. Although the hypothesized model demonstrated acceptable fit, it only offered partial support for H4—the direct path from moral judgment to academic dishonesty was not significant, nor its indirect path through responsibility judgment. A modified version of the hypothesized model was tested and demonstrated a better fit than the hypothesized model. This modified model indicated that self-regulation (in the form of selective moral disengagement) played a significant mediating role in the relations between moral judgment and academic dishonesty, and that moral motivation (i.e., responsibility judgments) meditated the relationship between moral judgment and moral disengagement. The relationships are summarized in Figure 5 as a narrative chain of events, whereby both moral judgment (“It's morally wrong”) and motivation (“I'm responsible”)—and the protective impetus and drive they offer against cheating—are neutralized through moral disengagement (“It's not my fault”) and result in a gap between judgment and action (“I did it”).

Finally, and consistent with H5, both the hypothesized and modified models demonstrated a better fit than the three more parsimonious models of moral functioning tested. The latter models included a simple bivariate model of the direct effects of moral judgment on academic dishonesty (as Socrates would have it), a tri-variate model with responsibility judgment mediating the relations between judgment and dishonesty (consistent with Kohlberg and Candee, 1984), and another tri-variate model with moral disengagement as the mediator (as suggested by Bandura, 1986, 1990). In short, findings from the present study suggest that while moral judgment is important, it is only one of several components needed for effective moral functioning; motivation and self-regulation play critical mediating roles in helping to bridge the divide between judgment and action.

The findings of the present investigation are significant in at least three important ways. Firstly, the findings associated the first purpose contribute to the literature on moral judgment related to academic dishonesty and its assessment. While most previous studies have measured how much they believed academic dishonesty to be “wrong,” “serious,” or “unacceptable” (e.g., Anderman et al., 1998; Jordan, 2001; Murdock et al., 2004; Stephens et al., 2007), the present study developed and used a new instrument rooted in SDT (Turiel, 1983; Nucci, 2001; Smetana, 2006) that assessed what domain of behavior students use to classify or judge academic dishonesty. In doing so, the present investigation demonstrated that judgments of cheating behavior vary not only in degree (as typically assessed) but also in kind (as social domains). The domain distinctions made—personal, conventional, or moral—have important implications for moral functioning (as discussed next), and the instrument presented here offers researchers a valid and reliable approach to investigating these distinctions as they relate to academic dishonesty.

Findings associated with this study's second purpose—the associations between domain judgments and academic dishonesty—are of particular significance for educators well as those developing courses or programs aimed at promoting academic integrity. Specifically, the results clearly indicate that moral judgment matters (students who deemed an action “morally wrong” where less likely to report doing it) and that not all students see academic dishonesty (in its various forms) as morally wrong. Taken together these findings suggest that education is both warranted and needed. Specifically, teachers and developers should look for opportunities to engage students in discussions about academic integrity—what it means, why it's important, and especially how academic dishonesty (in all its forms) involves moral issues and values (e.g., fairness, honesty, and trust). Fortunately, the rising tide of concern over academic cheating over the past decade has produced several approaches for promoting academic integrity, including classroom-based seminars for secondary students (e.g., Stephens and Wangaard, 2016) as well as school-wide interventions aimed at “cultivating integrity” (e.g., Seider et al., 2013; Stephens and Wangaard, 2013).

The final contribution of this study concerns the findings related to its third purpose involving the testing of several theoretical models of moral functioning. These findings (even if modestly) contribute to the long-standing and on-going dialog among psychologists, philosophers, and others interested in the judgment-action gap or moral functioning more broadly. In particular, results from the present study add to the existing literature by offering four-component model of moral functioning that helps bridge the divide between judgment and action as it relates to academic dishonesty. While such multiple-component models are not unique to the literature (e.g., Kohlberg and Candee, 1984; Rest, 1986; Beck and Ajzen, 1991; Rest et al., 1999; Olafson et al., 2012), the final model supported in this study brings together important constructs from several theoretical perspectives in a novel way that highlight the role of motivational and self-regulatory factors in bridging the divide between belief and behavior. Importantly, the results illustrate that while moral judgment is necessary for moral functioning, it is only one among many components needed for effective moral functioning—motivation derived from a sense of the personal responsibility and the activation of self-regulatory subfunctions (and not their disengagement) are needed as well if a judgment-action gap is to be mitigated.

Finally, findings from the present investigation have important implications of educators and policy makers interested in reducing the widespread problem of academic dishonesty. Specifically, these findings suggest that intervention efforts should not only focus on strengthening students' moral judgments related to cheating, but also on forming both a sense of personal responsibility for not cheating and a resistance (what Kohlberg called “ego strength”) to undermining that sense of responsibility through moral disengagement. In short, more holistic approaches are needed to ameliorate the widespread problem of academic dishonesty (Stephens, 2016).

The present study used a cross-sectional research design, where data was collected at a single point of time via an anonymous self-report survey. While convenient and cost-effective, this design and method of data gathering presents limits with respect to making firm causal claims (Campbell and Fiske, 1959). Structural equation modeling was used to simulate potential causal effects, but more robust research designs are needed to affirm of relations found in the present study. Future studies should employ longitudinal or experimental designs to assess the causal effects of moral judgments on academic dishonest and mediating roles of motivational and self-regulatory factors. Another important limitation concerns the generalizability of the findings. The sample of participants were from a single source—a relatively small one of secondary students at a highly selective private school in the northeastern United States (Podsakoff and Organ, 1986). Future research should seek to procure larger, more demographically-diverse samples to assess the validity of the model (or ones like it) in different contexts and populations.

Finally, the present study was limited with respect to the processes and outcomes selected for investigation. While there were sound theoretical and methodological reasons for the four constructs included (and results confirmed their validity and importance), student engagement in academic dishonesty is must certainly a function of many factors beyond the four assessed here. Future research should include of other social-cognitive processes as well as situational and cultural variables. The models tested here were limited to the former processes, and did well to explain 28% of variance in academic dishonesty, but much remains to be studied and understood in bridging the divide between students' beliefs and behaviors related to cheating.

The results of the present study lead to following flow of conclusions: (1) most students' believe academic dishonesty is wrong—conventionally or morally—but judgments vary across individuals and types of cheating behavior more educational opportunities are needed to help students perceive and reason through the moral dimensions of cheating, because; (2) moral judgment matters—students who believe an action to be morally wrong are less likely to engage in it, however; (3) moral functioning is multi-component and effortful—while moral judgment may be necessary for moral action, its relationship is best understood as indirect, requiring the support of motivational variables (such as a sense of personal responsibility for not cheating) and one's related to self-regulatory ones (such as mechanisms of moral disengagement that counter the influences of moral judgment and motivation) to bridge the oft-observed divide between them.

As the sole author, JS was responsible for the conception of the work as well as all analysis and interpretation of data, the creation of all tables and figures, and all writing associated with the manuscript.