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Abstract
We investigated the acceptability and use frequency of cognitive enhancement medication and three different types of academic misconduct (plagiarism, cheating, and falsifying/fabricating data). Data collected from a web-based survey of German university students were used in our analysis. Moral acceptability of cognitive enhancers was relatively low and moderate for academic misconduct. The correlation between these measures was moderately weak. The use frequency of cognitive enhancers was lower than for academic misconduct and was (very) lightly correlated with the occurrences of reported plagiarism and fabrication/falsification. A higher acceptability of each act was associated with a higher use frequency of each act.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank all those who helped conducting this study, especially Dominik Koch, Ines Meyer, Andrea Schulze, Floris van Veen, Constantin Wiegel, and Sebastian Willen. Thanks to members of the Neuroethics Research Unit and Constantin Wiegel for feedback on a previous version of this article and to Victoria Saigle for editorial assistance.
FUNDING
This research was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FMER; 01PH08024, headed by Sebastian Sattler and Martin Diewald). Sebastian Sattler was funded by a PostDoc Fellowship of the Fritz-Thyssen-Foundation and the Cologne Graduate School in Management, Economics and Social Sciences. The FMER did not influence any interpretations or force the research team to produce biased results. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the policies of the funder.
Notes
2. 1Rawls’s principles of justice (in the final formulation) state that (a) each person has the same indefeasible claim to a fully adequate scheme of equal basic rights and liberties, which scheme is compatible with the same scheme of liberties for all (the equal liberty principle), and (b) social and economic inequalities are to satisfy two conditions: first, they are to be attached to positions and offices open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity (the principle of fair equality of opportunity), and second, they are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society (the difference principle). See Rawls (Citation2001, pp. 42–43).
3. 2One indication of increased competition among students in Germany is that the percentage of students per age cohort has increased from 30.2% in 2000 to 42.4% in 2010 (Statistisches Bundesamt, Citation2012) This means that more students compete for the same pool of available jobs, and thus achieving excellent grades becomes more important. Furthermore, with the advent of the economic crisis, jobs are increasingly becoming scarce resources for which a greater number of people compete. In some countries where higher education is very expensive (like in the United States), indebtedness of students increases the pressure to succeed.
4. 3We recontacted students only when they completed the preceding wave and when they continued studying in their university.
5. 4All questions have been translated from German to English by Sebastian Sattler.
6. 5When comparing mean values, one has to consider that moral acceptability for cognitive enhancer use was measured on a 7-point scale, whereas the acceptability for academic misconduct was measured on a 5-point scale (see Methods section).
7. 6Here we conducted partial correlation coefficients to take the correlation between moral acceptability and the referred behavior into account (see next paragraph). Therefore, results are controlled for the influence of the moral acceptability.
8. 7To have a similar longitudinal testing strategy as applied for academic misconduct, we confirmed the cross-sectional finding concerning cognitive enhancer use presented here with a longitudinal test (results available upon request).
9. 8Even though for reasons of space we cannot address this issue further, the postulated difference between substantive cultural value systems of “Psychotropic Hedonism” and “Pharmacological Calvinism” (Klerman, Citation1972) might be relevant in this context. Namely, if the substantive value orientation of an individual is oriented toward new experiences (Hedonism), experimenting with mind affecting substances might be viewed as more acceptable on a personal or even a social level, whereas if the substantive value orientation is grounded in risk-averse dispositions (Calvinism), a zero-tolerance attitude toward medications beyond a therapeutic context might be entailed. This issue might have been assessed if the respondents were asked about their attitude toward marijuana consumption, but in the absence of such data we can only speculate.