Big Five personality and academic dishonesty: A meta-analytic review

Academic dishonesty is widespread within secondary and higher education. It can include unethical academic behaviors such as cheating, plagiarism, or unauthorized help. Researchers have investigated a number of individual and contextual factors in an effort to understand the phenomenon. In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in the role personality plays in explaining unethical academic behaviors. We used meta-analysis to estimate the relationship between each of the Big Five personality factors and academic dishonesty. Previous reviews have highlighted the role of neuroticism and extraversion as potential predictors of cheating behavior. However, our results indicate that conscientiousness and agreeableness are the strongest Big Five predictors, with both factors negatively related to academic dishonesty. We discuss the implications of our findings for both research and practice.