An Empirical Study on the Relationship between Moral Disengagement and Academic Dishonesty

In recent years, some universities have revoked graduate degrees due to academic fraud, which has caused a seriously negative impact on the academic environment. Moral disengagement refers to the process by which individuals cognitively restructure their unethical behavior in order to alleviate the internal discomfort and guilt arising from moral conflict. Therefore, moral disengagement is considered an important predictor in the study of academic dishonesty. However, the causal relationship between the two still requires further investigation. Based on this, this study takes college students from a university in Shanxi as research subjects and adopts an empirical research method to investigate the relationship between explicit moral disengagement, implicit moral disengagement, and academic dishonesty. The study finds that both explicit and implicit moral disengagement are significant predictors of academic dishonesty among college students. The higher the level of either, the more likely academic dishonesty is to occur. From the perspective of gender, the incidence among males is higher than that among females.