Narrow facets of honesty-humility predict collegiate cheating

As collegiate cheating is a growing concern across the world, researchers have started to explore personality traits for a better understanding of why students engage in such behavior. Whilst prior studies investigated the relationship between personality and general academic dishonesty criteria (viz., counter-academic behavior), this study aimed to provide a deeper understanding of how narrow facets of honesty-humility (i.e., HEXACO Personality Inventory) predict both general and specific academic dishonest behavior. Results from our study of 308 university students replicated prior findings in that the narrow facet, fairness, was the best predictor of broad counter-academic behavior. However, our data revealed that greed avoidance predicted a more specific form of academic dishonest behavior, namely collegiate cheating. Furthermore, narrow facets of honesty-humility show incremental predictive validity above and beyond the global trait when explaining variance in both general and specific self-reported measures.