Honor Among Students: The Effects of Punishment Severity on Whistleblowing

The current study used a classroom cheating paradigm to investigate how severity of punishment affected the rate at which bystander students reported a confederate’s blatant cheating behavior to an authority. Participants were asked to read and memorize a passage of literature before taking a memory and comprehension quiz about its contents. The instructions included one of three conditions: low, medium, and severe levels of punishment for cheating during the quiz. During the memorization and testing time, a confederate student cheated by using their phone. The rate of reporting was found to be significantly different across the punishment conditions; participants reported cheating more often in the lowest punishment condition than in the highest severity condition. These findings suggest that more severe punishments for transgressions may discourage whistleblowing behavior from peers; future work should further explore motivations at play, elaborating on the link between punishments and reports.