|
Advantages
- one strength is how the results can be applied to support the determinism side of the free will versus determinism debate. Reading the anti-free will essay reduced participants' belief in free will, a change that accounted for the impact of the essay on cheating behaviour. The results therefore support the idea that human cheating behaviour is more linked to a belief in determinism than free will.
- supporting evidence for the study and it's conclusions comes from Schab (1991), who found that between 1969 and 1989, student responses reflected increasingly pessimistic opinions about dishonesty in school and society. fear of failure remained the most common reason for cheating, more students admitted to cheating on a test or homework. this is due to having a belief that their results in tests were already determined and had little to do with any free will or control on their part.
|
Disadvantages
- one weaknesses is how cheating was measured(by not pressing the space bar). this method of assessing cheating also means that simply doing nothing is coded as cheating. so, the anti-free will essay may have caused non-participation generally, rather than cheating behaviour specifically. although participants were instructed to press the space bar to avoid receiving the answers, their failure to do so does not guarantee they were cheating
- method was laboratory based, which means both the setting and the task were artificial and cannot be applied to real life. demanding characteristics are a common part of the experiment like this and the participants may have felt they had to act in a certain way due to all the instructions given from the researchers regarding the space bar.
- what the participants were asked to do also lacks task validity as it is not a normal, everyday procedure to do what they did.
|
Comments
No comments have yet been made