Situational ethics of cheating

¶ … Ethics of Cheating: Children Cheating at Play

For my paper, I decided to do a case study of an arena in which I am most familiar with cheating, that of the playground. I chose to observe a group of elementary and middle-school children during recess, while they were playing on a school playground and engaging in informal and formal rule-bound games and activities. From my own experience, I remembered that the rules of 'waiting one's turn' for playground equipment, playing by the rules of games, and allowing everyone to participate were occasionally observed fairly rigorously, and other times not observed at all. With a more mature perspective, I wanted to understand why this was the case.

Part

From what I recalled of my own youthful experiences, I remembered that frequent cheaters were often the least, rather than the most popular students. To verify if the current research supported my anecdotal recollections, I consulted the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, which stated that when rejected and aggressive children play with their peers, their interactions often appear more hostile and adversarial than other children's interactions and they are more prone to cheat at games, or to accuse other children of cheating (Rubin 2003). When observed both in informal and laboratory settings, rejected children were found to engage in more unfair play than other children. When the rejected children felt that their opponent was cheating they were also more negative and argumentative (Rubin 2003). To some extent, this runs counter to popular media images of rejected children, who are often portrayed as more innocent of childhood games of cheating, such as in works of children's literature sympathetic to misfits and outcasts.

Thus I agreed with the literature that the lower the social statuses of the participants the more likely the children would be to engage in unfair play, particularly unfair aggressive play, as it has also been observed in previous studies that "Children who both perceive that they are rejected and who tend to blame their peers for social failure experiences may, then, be primed to be physically aggressive towards their peers" (Guerra et al. 2004). It should be noted, in terms of evaluating the study's accuracy that subjects of the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology about cheating were all African-American, and from disadvantaged backgrounds and although unspoken in the study, one wonders if this sense of societal victimization had any effect on the children's observed relationship with teachers, although their peers who described the unpopular cheaters as rejected and aggressive were also African-American. Although the study could have been more racially comparative in nature, it is worth noting that logically, the more rejected someone is, the less he or she has to lose by violating social rules, and the more he or she has to gain by cheating. Males were also noted to be more apt to cheat in the study.

Age also has an effect on cheating. According to the Encyclopedia of Childhood and Aggression, non-rejected children who are young may cheat simply out of ignorance. "Cheating as a concept is not understood by children until around age seven. Preschoolers often change the rules to a game as they play, innocent of the fact that rules must remain consistent to have any meaning. By seven, however, children have gained an understanding of rules, fairness, and honesty, and cheating then becomes intentional" (de Mott). When caught cheating, parenting experts in one popular 2005 MSNBC article on cheating notes that children of all ages will often deny "that a rule was broken" even if this is blatantly the case.

Part 3

In my observations, I watched children between the ages of seven to twelve at a middle school during recess. Most were Caucasian and middle-class, thus I was not able to observe racial or socio-economic differences, only gender differences. Some of my observations confirmed what I had read. Children who were angry, aggressive, and did not have a group of friends to talk to on the playground were more likely to cut in line to play on popular equipment. However, the gender difference was much more pronounced than the literature might reveal. Rejected girls seemed more likely to withdraw from games, than attempt to become involved and to cheat to show mastery through cheating.