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November
Cheating
There are several situations in which boys are
frequently tempted to cheat—in sports, for
example, or in their after-school
employment—but I've elected to look mainly at
academic cheating because academic work is the
equivalent in a boy's life to his parents' jobs. A
student who habitually cheated in his schoolwork
might find it less guilt-provoking to cheat in his
adult work than he would if he had gone through
school with academic integrity.
Boys are familiar with cheating well before they
are tempted to practice it academically. They may
have observed it or done it in family
life—cheating in games in order to win, for
example—or in play groups. They may have heard
parents boast of successful cheating—on
expense accounts or tax returns. Cheating is rife
in adult life, from white-collar business fraud to
falsified research data.
My brother, Henry, is a high school social
studies teacher. It was thus natural for me to turn
to him first for information on academic cheating
by boys today. According to Henry, cheating is
prevalent in high school. He told me about a boy he
observed using a crib sheet during the first exam
of the past school year. Henry reacted with obvious
enough indignation that the rest of the class
immediately knew of the transgression and teased
the student mercilessly for weeks. The academic
penalty for the student was to get a grade of zero
to begin the year's grading.
In Henry's school, there is no established
school policy on cheating penalties—maybe a
sign in itself that the school as an institution is
uncertain how to deal with cheating. Each teacher
has to use his own judgment. There is no written
school code of academic and social behavior, nor
are students regularly reminded of standards of
behavior. It is assumed that "everyone knows"
cheating is not permitted.
The happy fallout of the story is that Henry's
student responded to the cheating exposure by
buckling down to work; by June he was near the top
of the class despite having his initial grade of
zero averaged in. He became an exemplary student,
not only successful in tests but impressive in
classroom discussions.
Others might regard the embarrassing public
exposure as contributing to the boy's change of
direction, but Henry believes he would just as
surely have changed course if Henry had handled the
episode firmly but more discreetly—in other
words, without shaming the boy publicly. Henry
regrets his outburst when he discovered the crib
sheet. It is better, he says, not to embarrass
students deliberately. Peer status is everything to
kids, he believes. The last thing a student wants
is to be uncool. Though Henry didn't say so,
perhaps what classmates considered socially uncool
in this situation was that the student got caught,
not that the student had attempted to cheat. A boy
who cheats today does so as a member of a society
in which appearances are often judged more harshly
than underlying social realities. Adultery, for
example, is reported by survey research to be a
prevalent type of cheating. There is little
evidence of public concern about adultery if it is
effectively kept secret.
Every boy has to sort out for himself a set of
inconsistent social cues that he is given beginning
in childhood. One cue is that cheating is wrong,
but other cues include the obvious fact that some
people think it is more wrong than others do, that
society as a whole regards some forms of cheating
as morally worse than others, and that sometimes
people are more scornful of getting caught than of
the cheating offense itself. I don't think it is
too exaggerated to say that there is a culture of
dishonesty coexistent with a culture of integrity
in our society. A boy who is tempted to cheat has
many precedents from the culture of dishonesty to
use as justification when he elects to cheat.
Fortunately, he also has exposure to the culture of
integrity that espouses good choices.
Another student came to see Henry late last year
to ask about his grade average. Henry consulted his
grading book and pointed out that the student had
failed to turn in some written assignments, a
factor that, if not remedied, would adversely
affect his final grade. The student hurried off to
complete the missing work. Then he went a step
further. He graded the assignments himself (very
highly) and tried to slip the papers into Henry's
desk. Unwittingly, he used a different color of ink
than Henry ever uses, so the cheating strategy was
exposed.
Reactions to cheating can be intemperate and
have unpredictable consequences. A female high
school teacher spoke about getting caught cheating
in an English lit course during her freshman year
in college. She had plagiarized a published
critique of a work for one of her reports, and her
professor recognized the passages and knew their
source.
The dean suspended her for a semester. He said
of her cheating, "You've done well, but not well
enough. We suspect you've done this kind of thing
in all your classes." His suspicious accusations
were untrue. She was deeply affected by the way a
single incident had provoked a wholesale
condemnation of her character.
The eighteenth-century philosopher, Jean Paul
Richter, commented: "If a child tells a lie, tell
him that he has told a lie, but don't call him a
liar. If you define him as a liar, you break down
his confidence in his own character." I think his
is profoundly wise advice. What the dean did to the
student was to generalize her single offense and
call her a cheater. She might have withdrawn from
an academic career, or she might have developed a
deep resentment of his unfair characterization of
her and resolved to cheat more skillfully.
Fortunately, this student resolved to clear her
reputation. After serving her suspension, she
returned to the same college, graduated with
honors, and now counsels all her high school
students on the potential consequences of cheating.
Her story is sobering, but is her experience the
final word on cheating? How prevalent is cheating,
and is it best handled with a
punishment-as-deterrent policy?
Why Do Students Cheat?
Who's Who Among American High School Students
surveyed 3,210 "high achievers" in 1997.
Eighty-eight percent judged cheating to be "common"
among their peers. Seventy-six percent confessed
they themselves had cheated. Compare this figure to
the results of a national sample of college
students in the 1940s, only 20 percent of whom
admitted to cheating in high school when questioned
anonymously. The students queried in 1997 ranked
copying someone else's homework as the most
frequently practiced form of cheating (65 percent
of the cheaters); cheating on a quiz or test next
most often (38 percent); consulting a published
summary in lieu of reading the book, third (29
percent); and plagiarizing published work, fourth
(15 percent). "Every single day I see cheating, a
lot, in every single class I'm in," says a high
school freshman from Madison, Connecticut. "They
ask to see someone's homework, they write things on
their hands or bring in little cheat cards to hold
in their laps. It's bad."
Another type of academic cheating appears to
have increased significantly in the past few
decades. When William Bowers surveyed 5,000 college
students in 1963, 11 percent admitted to
collaborating with other students on work that was
assigned to be done individually. Donald McCabe and
Linda Trevino partially replicated Bowers's study
in 1993 at some of the same colleges and found 49
percent admitting to the same kind of forbidden
collaboration. My brother Henry's policy, when he
discovers evidence of collaboration on work that
was assigned to be done individually, is to grade
the work on its merits, then divide the grade by
the number of collaborators.
The odds of getting away with academic cheating
appear to be heavily in the cheater's favor.
Ninety-two percent of the confessed cheaters
surveyed by Who's Who said they had never been
caught. As we shall see, temptation to try cheating
may be encouraged by the uncertain application of
penalties: from severe to nothing at all. The
prevailing attitude of a majority of students about
cheating is that "it's not a big deal."
"They are driven cheaters," says the high school
teacher I've mentioned who was suspended from
college for cheating. "They do it for grades, not
because they're lazy or stupid or don't know the
material. It's sad, you see, because they're so
driven to have a high grade-point average so they
can get into their first-choice college. I hate it,
because they lose interest in learning. I tell
their parents that it's okay if they get a B. It's
more important to be a well-rounded, interested,
bright kid. But that's a hard sell."
When Henry and I were schoolboys, the students
who were believed to have the strongest incentive
to cheat were the students in danger of failing. Is
the primary incentive now to get into the college
of one's choice? A Chicago area mother reflected
the grade pressure recently when she complained
bitterly to a teacher upon her son's receiving a B
instead of the desired A. The grade, the mother
argued, could make the difference between her son's
"getting into Northwestern or having to settle for
Northeastern." While one might give her credit for
knowing how to turn a phrase, she doesn't appear
ready to settle for a "well-rounded, interested,
bright kid" who gets B's.
Eighty percent of high school students share the
belief that college is the door to a successful
career, and they may believe as well that the
better the college, the better the chances of
success later on. Only about 50 percent of the
students in high school today will actually go on
to college, but about 80 percent of middle school
and high school students say they intend to go to
college. While there are many ways to define
success, and not all of them go through college,
it's easier to see that later in life than it is as
a teenager.
About 20 percent of high school students are in
some kind of serious alienation from the
educational system at any given time, surveys
suggest. They are working too many hours in paid
employment to cope with schoolwork, or they have
been devastated by drugs or alcohol or crime, or
they are distracted by psychiatric or severe family
problems, among the more common reasons. What this
means is that almost everyone except the alienated
student is pushing toward the door to college. In
that kind of environment, the temptation to cheat
to get the coveted admission or scholarships must
be very powerful indeed.
The self- and family-induced pressure to get
into the "right" college is not unlike the pressure
many adults feel as they try to balance their
economic and social class aspirations with the
realities of their incomes. When they sit down to
subtract from disposable income what they owe in
taxes, the temptation to cheat a little here and
there, or a lot, is very powerful.
Bill BrashIer, a journalist, decided to compare
high school statistics on cheating to seventh-grade
attitudes and practices by interviewing several
classes of bright students selected for magnet
programs. The seventh graders, especially the boys,
were quick to tell him their methods. How they
wrote information relevant to tests on shoe soles
or wrists. How they covertly used pocket
calculators when it was forbidden. How the class
brain signaled correct answers to the others. Their
methods were more traditional than the technique of
some high school boys I read about who wrote crib
sheet information on the underside of their
baseball cap brims until their high school teacher
said all such hats had to be worn backward during
exams.
They all cheated, the seventh graders said, on
tests, on homework, on reports. One of their
teachers laughed off their talk as exaggeration, as
a way of being cool. Only a few of them, he
insisted, cheated as much as they all claimed. But
why did they all claim to cheat?
The simple desire to take the easy road is
sometimes advanced as the basic reason that
students cheat. My brother says that in almost
thirty years of teaching he has never ceased being
surprised how many students "just never studied."
So there would appear to be a certain portion of
the student body disposed from the beginning to
take the easy path: book reports off the Internet,
for example. A mother writing to an Internet
bulletin board provides a perfect example:
My 15-year-old son had an English paper due on
Great Expectations. When I didn't see him working
on it, I gave him a gentle reminder. 'Don't worry
Mom: he told me. 'My paper's going to be great.'
And it was. In fact, it was so great that I became
suspicious. I called up the file on our computer
and discovered that he had downloaded the paper
from the Internet! I was shocked. Even more
shocking was my son's attitude when I confronted
him with cheating. He didn't see it that way.
'Everyone cheats, Mom,' he said. Is he right? What
can I say to get through to him?
There certainly is a sizable pool of teenagers
who resent the cheating going on around them for
making it more difficult for them to succeed
honestly. But other testimony, including that of my
brother Henry, sounds plausible to me. Students, on
the whole, are very tolerant of other students'
cheating. The statistics, after all, indicate that
only somewhere between a fifth and a third have the
right to claim that they don't cheat. My guess is
that the incentive in the majority of cases is to
get a better grade, either to keep from failing or
to build a superior academic record to facilitate
getting into college; cheating as an easier path
than actually doing the work would also be a
motive, but one made all the more accessible by the
prevalence of cheating for other reasons.
Of those who don't cheat in order to get better
grades than they could get on their own, some
certainly are collaborating with cheaters by giving
them assistance—letting cheaters copy their
homework or look at their papers during exams, for
example. So they are endorsing cheating and
contributing to it, even though they aren't
benefiting from it. The mother of an eighth grader
found giving answers to others during a test argued
that his giving did not constitute cheating; only
receiving information was cheating, she said, as
she accused the teacher of pursuing a vendetta
against her son.
There may be some social benefit for the bright
collaborator in a system in which cheating is
widespread. For the "brain" to give others the
opportunity to copy his work, thus leveling the
academic playing field to some extent, would be
viewed as a "cool" thing to do in some schools. A
bright student who refused to assist other students
asking for collaboration in cheating might be
ridiculed or excluded from high-status cliques and
crowds.
Attitudes Toward Cheating
eer, long before he had become an icon of
American architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright was so
desperate to acquire a commission that he showed
his potential client one of Louis Sullivan's great
buildings in Chicago and claimed that he, Wright,
was its architect. He got the commission. I think
of Wright whenever I'm tempted to assume that it's
the untalented who cheat, or that cheating will
surely corrupt talent.
Of the three parties most interested in the
outcome of a high school cheating incident—the
accused student, the teacher (and the school
administrators behind him or her), and the parents,
each has a different perspective. The alleged
pressure that leads to cheating is attributed by
most high school students to their parents, to
their peers, and sometimes to their own personal
calculations.
The overwhelming testimony of high school
students is that when a student is caught cheating,
the teacher, out of sympathy, misguided or not, or
out of desire to avoid personal confrontation with
the student or his parents, often looks the other
way. Many instances of exposed cheating are not
followed up. The teacher knows that even the most
blatant case may provoke hassling by parents,
administrative hearings, maybe an override decision
by the principal, or even litigation. For whatever
reason, most of the time there is no penalty.
Consequently, there is little general deterrence
based on fear.
In some instances, I'm sure, the disinclination
of the teacher to pursue evidence of cheating is
based on sympathy for students trying to cope in a
grade-oriented system. My brother has a high school
teacher colleague who, when he is teaching a class
drawn from a low-achiever track, deliberately
leaves the room for a few minutes during each test
so that the students can swap answers. He
rationalizes this action on the basis that those
students need "all the help they can get." So, in
certain respects, the status quo pits students and
teachers as allies against the grading system.
In times now gone by, a teacher could afford
without risk to judge each case of cheating on its
merits, meting out either punishment or exemption.
These days, however, teachers are often judged on
the overall performance of their classes, compared,
when feasible, to standards set on a statewide or
nationwide basis. Teachers now have incentive to
collude with students' cheating in order to make it
appear that the teacher has been successful in
raising class performance to an acceptable
level.
In 1995 the Academic Decathlon team from a
Chicago high school compiled a tremendous score on
the six-hour written examination that is the basis
of the competition, and it appeared the school had
won the coveted state title. But elation soon
turned to dismay when evidence of cheating turned
up. With the collusion of the faculty mentor, the
team had prepared ahead of time, using a stolen
copy of the exam questions. "It was such a good
team," the principal remembers ruefully. "A dream
team. They didn't have to win it all. It would have
been wonderful if they had finished tenth or
twelfth in the state. We'd have been so proud.
Instead they went right down the tubes. It was
gut-wrenching." The school hasn't fielded a team
since then.
Parents may swing back and forth from a parental
role in which they are interested in remedying
their sons' cheating, to overidentifying with their
sons. A father whose eighth-grade son had been
suspended for cheating, said that he supported the
suspension; but, he said, if the suspension caused
any permanent blemish on his son's school record,
or if the matter were made public in such a way as
to harm his son's reputation, he would immediately
switch passionately to his son's defense.
Educational Testing Services, known worldwide
for its standard entrance examinations for colleges
and universities, recently proposed a national
public service campaign against cheating,
especially in test-taking in schools. The rationale
for the campaign cited the same kind of statistics
I've cited above concerning the prevalence of
academic cheating. The plan targeted nine- to
twelve-year-olds in public schools as a group to be
taught individual values such as honesty,
integrity, and responsibility. Though I think there
are flaws in the proposal, I applaud attempts to
raise the level of national awareness of character
issues.
One theme of the proposal emphasized individual
competition: "Children need to understand that
tests are a part of life-whether it be your turn at
bat or a spelling quiz. Each is a test, and each
requires practice. . . . In order to prepare
themselves for winning, children need to understand
that winning requires doing, and doing requires
learning. If a child hasn't learned to swing a bat,
he won't hit the ball." As the proposal concluded,
at another point, "Cheating undermines integrity
and fairness at all levels. It leads to weak life
performance and corrodes the merit basis of our
society."
Another theme of the proposal emphasized the
intrinsic value of learning, though not without
getting learning, values, and success intertwined:
"Children must know that learning, knowledge,
values and ethics are more important in assuring
moral character and success, than just getting by
or getting a grade:' (Italics mine.) If only
individual children would adopt the view that it is
learning that matters, and that cheating obscures
lack of learning, it is suggested, all will be
well. There is a degree of contradiction between
these two themes. A college student newspaper essay
quoted in the Educational Testing Service proposal
identifies the contradiction without knowing how to
resolve it. For some students, the essay says,
the desire to secure the best grades has become
a paramount force that drives their education. With
so much emphasis placed on outcomes in our society
something is lost along the way. The learning
process becomes overshadowed by the final outcome.
. . . Grades, rather than education, have become
the major focus of many students entering
universities today. Their goals become simple: get
in, survive, get the grade, and get out.
Why target nine- to twelve-year-olds in a
campaign about cheating? It is in the middle school
years (sixth or seventh through eighth or ninth
grades, depending on where a particular school
system makes the divisions) that grading gets
emphasized in many American schools; there are
schools that do not give numerical or letter grades
for achievement until the sixth or seventh grade.
It is in the middle school years that widespread
cheating is first noticed, and the phenomenon
intensifies in high school.
Researchers at the University of Kentucky
studied cheating patterns among almost three
hundred middle school students. Forty percent of
the students admitted to cheating. "Cheaters
thought the purpose of school is to compete and
show how smart you are," says the main author of
the study. "To them, what's most important is doing
better than others and getting the right
answers."
Defining cheating as an individual moral issue
for a meritocracy carries a barely hidden ideology
with it; and that ideology, of course, is as open
to moral scrutiny as is the issue of cheating
itself. The implication of pure meritocracy is that
everyone should take the test honestly, and the
(perhaps relatively few) winners should reap the
coveted rewards, and all the losers should accept
the verdict and make do with the scraps that are
left over. The tracking system in many middle and
high schools begins early in life to assign kids
their probable destinations in the meritocracy.
Is it any wonder that adolescents try to rig the
system to their own benefit and that they often do
it in collaborative ways that suggest collective
solidarity as much as individual self-interest? As
Robin Stansbury wrote in the Hartford-Courant,
Jake Raphael was sitting quietly in his
sixth-period foreign language class at West
Hartford's Hall High School last year when his
teacher passed out a weekly quiz—a quiz
Raphael had already obtained the answers to. It
happened quickly earlier that morning, as students
shuffled between classes. Another student, who had
taken the test earlier, shoved the copied exam into
Raphael's outstretched hands. He wasn't the only
student given an advance copy of the test. Most of
the students in the afternoon session had seen the
quiz by the time the class began. Raphael, now a
senior, said he debated with himself for only a
minute that morning before deciding to memorize the
quiz. And as he sat at his desk, the perfectly
completed quiz sheet before him, Raphael said he
had no remorse.
One way to evaluate a school is to analyze how
it emphasizes two different modes—a learning
mode or a selection mode. The latter mode
emphasizes the selection, mainly through grading,
of the students who are the brightest. There is
certainly a very substantial overlap between good
grades and the amount of learning that has
occurred. Sometimes, though, real learning occurs
but it isn't fully reflected in the grading system.
In other instances, grades bestowed indicate more
learning has occurred than is true. Cheating would
account for some of this disparity, but not all of
it. Favoritism by teachers accounts for some of it,
too.
For the learning mode to fulfill its promise, I
think a society has to establish hope for every
student that diligent and honest effort will be
rewarded with attractive continuing opportunities
in life, no matter how well his results stack up
against the grades of the best students. It is too
idealistic to argue that learning is its own
reward, because you can't expect kids growing up
not to make decisions based heavily on how their
choices might take them toward a satisfying
career.
A learning mode would naturally take into
consideration the many factors that can adversely
influence an individual student's capacity: a
difficult temperament; emotional problems such as
depression; neurological problems such as ADD/ ADHD
or dyslexia; health problems that affect vision or
hearing; distracting. sometimes abusive, family
situations; social barriers such as racial, ethnic.
or class prejudice; the amount of family support
available; and the quality of instruction both
technically and temperamentally. A learning-based
system tries to take account of all these factors.
because only in doing so can the potential of the
student be maximized. Merit or grading systems, I
believe, show less incentive to try to make the
playing field as level as it can be for all.
Every school is a mixture of both these modes.
The teachers that most high school students
remember with highest affection are the teachers
who inspired them to learn, often by teaching a
subject with notable brilliance and enthusiasm, but
many times also by showing acute sensitivity to the
particular needs of students. But most middle and
high schools are dominated by the grading system,
and the evidence of it is the prevalence of
cheating.
When learning is most highly valued, there is
little incentive to cheat. When grades matter most,
cheating rises as students begin to use every
available means to increase their class ranking, or
be seen as helpful to friends when they offer work
to copy. Thus we may think of cheating as a social
phenomenon induced by grading pressure at least as
much as it is a phenomenon of individual character
failure. The grading pressure is generated by the
culture and personified by many parents. We can see
resistance to this pressure when better students
give worse students their homework to copy—by
far the most common form of school cheating. This
is too massive a phenomenon to be dismissed
individual by individual; it amounts to social
resistance by the young. Collaborative academic
cheating is, in its way, an odd expression of
altruism among adolescents at the same time that it
is a deceitful breaking of rules.
Who Loses with Cheating?
The literature on cheating is surprisingly
inconclusive on what constitutes its moral offense.
Some writers, viewing academic cheating as a
"victimless" act. argue that the damage is mainly
self-inflicted. The cheater appears to know more,
or be more competent, than is actually the case. A
weakness is being papered over, and sooner or later
it will harm the cheater when he can't perform as
expected at a higher academic level, or
professionally, and is made to suffer the
consequences.
This argument—that cheating harms the
cheater-is learning—based in a
grading-dominated environment. When grades are the
defining element and the competition is intense,
many students will employ every means they can to
stay afloat as long as they can. The very
prevalence of academic cheating suggests to
cheating students that their bubble of deception
might never burst.
Others writers view cheating as a form of
stealing. Academic cheating does involve stealing
recognition and grades that are undeserved, and
that others are earning meritoriously. Cheating is
always fraudulent, and shows disrespect for the
people directly affected by it. In academic
cheating, fellow students are the ones treated
disrespectfully by cheaters. What keeps the issue
of respect from powerfully deterring student
cheaters is that they often don't stop to think of
other students as being hurt. Their focus is on
cheating as an issue between the cheater and the
faculty and administration. In an analogous case,
people who file false tax returns don't think of
themselves as hurting their neighbors who are
reporting accurately; the tax cheaters think of it
as an issue strictly between themselves and the
government or the IRS. Or, again, people who make
false insurance claims don't think of themselves as
raising everyone else's insurance rates; they
regard their cheating as an issue between them and
the insurance company. This blindness to the
consequences of cheating for one's peers is, I
believe, very widespread.
Patricia Hersch has described a forum in which
several bright high school seniors were asked to
comment on the hypothetical situation of a college
basketball star back on campus, exhausted, after
performing well in a game, and looking forward to
the next night's game when a professional scout
would be watching him. But tomorrow he also has a
calculus test in a course he must pass to keep his
scholarship. Should he study as best he can and
give it a try; hire a tutor and study most of the
night in order to get a passing grade; or get the
answer key to the exam, memorize it, then rest up
for the game? There was nearly unanimous agreement
that the student athlete should cheat. "Ethically,
I would cheat," says an honor student. Only one
boy, named Jonathan, disagrees: "We have to take
responsibility for our actions and if he screwed
up, it is his problem and he has to accept the
consequences. If he cheats, it is not taking
responsibility. If he stays up all night studying,
he does."
Theft as the essence of cheating is particularly
stressed in academic honor codes, for there the
student has the double responsibility of being
beyond reproach himself in the integrity of his
academic work, and also of coming forward to accuse
anyone whom he sees cheating; in fact, he is guilty
of a violation of the code if he knows of cheating
by others and does not report it to the judicial
system.
A professor of business at the University of
Kansas has built an honor code and other deterrents
into his sophomore course with an enrollment of
three hundred to four hundred students. Each
student is assigned a seat. A dozen or so vigilant
teaching assistants patrol blocks of fifty seats.
At the bottom of each test are two statements with
signature lines by them. One statement says: "I
have not received nor given unauthorized aid during
this exam. I have not observed any other students
receiving or giving such aid." The other says, "I
cannot in good faith sign the above statement."
To get credit for the exam, every student has to
sign one of the statements. If it is the second
one, he gets an interview with the professor; most
of those who sign the second statement think that
others may have been looking at their answers. The
teaching assistants also always compare the exams
of people sitting side by side. Only about 5
percent of the class get caught bucking this very
vigilant system.
There is some evidence that cheating occurs less
under honor code systems than other codes. It is
unclear whether the honor code promotes superior
character formation where it is employed.
Punishment is much surer and harsher, and more
evenly applied, when it is based on a proven
violation of an honor code; in addition to the
penalty, which might well rise to the level of
expulsion, there is dishonor or shaming for the
person found guilty of cheating. The environment
where an honor code is in effect doesn't tolerate
cheating to the extent it is tolerated in most high
schools.
Cheating and Trust
Even where cheating goes unnoticed, I believe it
deeply affects relationships because the
perpetrator knows he is violating someone's trust,
and therefore can't be candid about acts that, if
known, would deeply affect the relationship. The
cheater is always holding something back, and
people sensitive to human interaction can often
sense it. Adulterers, for example, may have taken
great pains to hide their infidelity, but something
about their behavior often sends a signal to their
partners, who may not know precisely what is wrong,
but know something has shifted in the
relationship.
Perhaps we are not quite as trusting, on the
whole, as some of our ancestors were. Many business
deals were once closed with an oral agreement
followed by a handshake as a seal of trust. Those
days are long gone. Now we like to have everything
in writing—an estimate for every project, a
warranty for every appliance, a printed insurance
policy for every risk. a waiver of liability for
every responsibility we undertake. The degree of
our trustfulness in many situations can be measured
by the length of the written contracts involved.
Where trust lags, people entering contracts, or
their lawyers in their behalf, want to specify the
consequences of every possible thing that could go
wrong.
Erik Erikson, in his delineation of the eight
developmental stages a person passes through from
birth to elderly age, saw the emergence of a sense
of basic trust as the central issue of an infant's
first year of life; this sense, he said. is nothing
less than the ontological source of faith and hope
in a person. Development of trust is concentrated
in the relationship between mother and child. The
child has very little capacity to give. so trust is
established by the trustworthiness of the mother to
give to him, and she can do that, Erikson suggests,
only if she is in a wholesome relationship to both
her infant and her culture. This is not just a
private transaction. The culture. and its degree of
nurturing and reliability, is a participant in the
process.
If the infant fails to develop trust, he falls
into basic mistrust.
One cannot know what happens in a baby, but
direct observation as well as overwhelming clinical
evidence indicate that early mistrust is
accompanied by an experience of 'total' rage, with
fantasies of the total domination or even
destruction of the sources of pleasure and
provision; and that such fantasies and rages live
on in the individual and are revived in extreme
states and situations.
Even in preschool years, trust comes to have a
deep mutuality. It cannot endure unless a boy has
an essential trustfulness of others and a matching
sense of his own trustworthiness. One cannot
survive without the other. No one gets through
childhood without some disappointments in the
quality or reliability of care received, so no boy
is completely trusting; no one completes childhood
without disappointing his family or others through
some acts of dishonesty or irresponsibility, so no
boy is completely trustworthy.
We fear for the welfare of any child who is
completely trusting; his gullibility may make him
too easily the victim of exploitation. But I fear
that gullibility is not as often the plight of the
child as is mistrust. Sadly, the landscape is
littered with parents, particularly fathers, who
are regarded by their sons with mistrust because of
too many broken promises, missed appointments,
failed expectations.
One way of nurturing trust is protecting the
reliability and truthfulness of one's word in the
sense conveyed by the phrase "keeping your word."
When boys begin to experiment with telling little
lies, the best approach, I believe, is not to try
to stigmatize lying as bad, but to explain, with
examples, that lying erodes trust. "What would you
feel if I told you every night that your supper is
ready, but when you came into the kitchen there was
no food ready to eat? Pretty soon you wouldn't
believe me. You need to know that I'm telling the
truth, even if I'm tempted not to. I need to know
that you're telling the truth, even if you're
tempted not to."
Another way of instilling trust in a boy is to
fulfill his basic material and emotional needs in a
dependable way. This can lead to many possible
disagreements as to what is "basic." Family
meetings, beginning with preschoolers and lasting
through teenage years, are almost indispensable
opportunities for exploring how needs are being met
or allegedly not met. Many children's requests
based on their own emergent values that the parent
may not share, are dismissed with the statement:
"You don't need that." At least, the subject should
be aired, reasons given, decisions explained.
Parents should also articulate what they feel they
need from their children materially (a few
household responsibilities, perhaps) and
emotionally. If parents don't express the need for
emotional giving from their children, their
children may not observe these needs on their
own.
Boys very much need to learn early in childhood
that incidents of lying and cheating are wrong, but
that they are subject to repair and redemption.
When deterrence is the main motive in dealing with
academic cheating, redemption takes a back seat
because the school authority wants the student to
believe that he continues under a cloak of
suspicion and mistrust.
A sense of basic trust may develop between
siblings, but it isn't inevitable, given the desire
of many children to protect fiercely their
relationships with parents and therefore to see
siblings as rivals. Boys may find it easier to
develop basic trust with siblings when all have
become adolescents or adults, and no longer feel as
competitive with each other.
The sense of basic trust between mother and
infant can, in childhood and later, be elaborated
in a variety of relationships of varying moral
value. When boys go off to school, opportunities
exist both for trust between peers and trust
between students and those teachers willing to be
mentors. Now a boy can begin to develop trustful
relations outside the family. In the course of his
school years, a boy begins to see that various
persons in his environment are making bids for
mutual trust and that it is not easy to fulfill all
of them. His parents may assume that the issue of
trust is something to be worked out principally at
home. His peers may be asserting the primacy of
trust among classmates. His teachers will be asking
for trustworthiness in his academic work and school
behavior.
A boy will sometimes experience these claims as
conflicting. Parents can help him to sort out these
conflicting bids for trust, showing him that where
there is conflict there is a moral problem to be
solved; so, for example, a boy might maintain trust
with his classmates but not to the extent of
participating in academic cheating, because
cheating would violate his trustworthiness with the
teacher.
The existence of trust among peers does not
guarantee that the group will pursue entirely
admirable purposes. Boyhood and adolescent gangs
value trust within the group very highly, and often
ritualize its importance. The activities of a gang
are usually a mixture of legitimate mutually
supportive activities and antisocial activities.
The biologically based aggressiveness of males can
be elevated in a group of mutually trusting boys.
Even on the playground, boys may bond in groups
that treat other boys and girls badly. So trust
will be invited in the service of a variety of
pursuits, some of them laudable and some of them
lamentable.
The great leap in trust possible in adolescence
or later adulthood is for an individual to become
trustworthy individually—even when it is not
reciprocated. Trust has to be reciprocal in infancy
or the infant develops basic mistrust. In
childhood, trust is still basically reciprocal in
the service of many ends of varying value. But an
individual can decide to strive for general
trustworthiness. Such an individual would choose
not to cheat in financial matters, taxes, or
professional responsibilities because he couldn't
do so without breaking trust with someone, maybe
someone he doesn't even know.
I believe males get to this highest level of
trustworthiness only when they are inspired to it
by encountering someone who embodies it. It is a
level of character that is much more effectively
caught than taught.
J. P. Richter [pseudo Jean Paul]
(1763-1825), quoted in I. Weiss and A. D. Weiss,
eds., Reflections on Childhood: A Quotations
Dictionary (Santa Barbara, Cal.: ABC-CLIO,
1991),204.
prevalence of cheating University of Kansas
Office of University Relations, "How Prevalent Is
Cheating?" Internet posting (1996) quoting David
Shulenburger, vice chancellor for academic affairs;
Beverly Sypher, associate professor of
communication studies; Tim Shaftel, associate dean
of liberal arts and sciences; Jordan Haines,
distinguished professor of business; Paul Krouse,
Who's Who publisher and founder; Lawrence Sherr,
Chancellors Club teaching professor of business
administration; and graduate teaching assistant Jim
Danoff-Burg, at
www.kurelatn@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu.
J. Johnson, S. Farkas, and A. Bers, Getting By:
What American Teenagers Really Think About Their
Schools (New York: Public Agenda, 1997), 29.
D. L. McCabe and W. J. Bowers, "Academic
Dishonesty Among Males in College: A Thirty Year
Perspective,"Journal of College Student Development
35 (1994),5-10.
D. L. McCabe and L. K. Trevino, "Individual and
Contextual Influences on Academic Dishonesty: A
Multicampus Investigation," Research in Higher
Education 38 (1997),379-396; "What We Know About
Cheating in College: Longitudinal Trends and Recent
Developments," Change 28 (1996), 28-33; and
"Academic Dishonesty: Honor Codes and Other
Contextual Influences," Journal of Higher Education
64 (1993),522-538.
W. Brashier, "So Smart They Cheat: In Today's
Moral Climate, Should Students be Held Accountable
for Abandoning Honesty?" Chicago Tribune Magazine
(April 12, 1998), 18-19.
Educational Testing Services, To Sound the
Alarm: Cheating Has Consequences. A Campaign
Proposal for "Commitment 2000," presented to The
Advertising Council, Inc., June 18, 1998
(Princeton: Educational Testing Services,
1998).
E. Anderman, T. Griesinger, and G. Westerfield,
"Motivation and Cheating During Early Adolescence,"
Journal of Educational Psychology 90 (1990),
84-93.
R. Stansbury, "When the Ends Justify the Means,"
Hartford Courant (March 2, 1997).
P. Hersch, A Tribe Apart: A Journey Into the
Heart of American Adolescence (New York: Fawcett
Columbine, 1998), 99.
Erikson, Identity, 82.
©2010 Eli Newberger
Eli Newberger,
M.D., a leading figure in the movement to improve
the protection and care of children, is renowned
for his ability to bring together good sense and
science on the main issues of family life. A
pediatrician and author of many influential works
on child abuse, he teaches at Harvard Medical
School and founded the Child Protection Team and
the Family Development Program at Children’s
Hospital in Boston. From his research and practice
he has derived a philosophy that focuses on the
strength and resilience of parent-child
relationships, and a practice oriented to
compassion and understanding, rather than blame and
punishment. He is the author of The
Men They Will Become: The Nature and Nurture
of Male Charaacter
and lives in Brookline, Massachusetts with his wife
Carolyn, a developmental and clinical child
psychologist." www.elinewberger.com
or E-Mail.
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