Attention all philosophers - be careful when you teach your students about freewill. You may end up with a classroom full of cheaters.

A recent article in Psychological Science argues that when students believe that they do not have freewill, they are more likely to cheat.

In one of the studies students were given literature on freewill and determinism. They were then asked to rate their confidence that they had freewill. Once they determined which students believed in determinism, they conducted a series of tests where an obvious cheating option was made available.

One of the experiments involved two groups that took a test with a monetary incentive for correct answers. The first group was scored by the experimenter. The second group was left to score themselves. Look at how the believers in determinism in the self-scoring group differ on the chart with respect to everyone else across both test groups.

Here's the link to the full article over at Cognitive Daily.