The Honesty & Ethics on Everyday Schooling (HEROES) Project based at the University of California, San Diego is looking to advance knowledge around the social influences that impact students' decisions about their academic integrity, work closely with students in the San Diego County area to gather information and provide students with opportunities in research, and use our new knowledge to help schools better understand their students, improve academic integrity, and provide support for students to help them avoid academic cheating and dishonesty.

We plan to achieve these goals through 2 studies:

In the first study, high school interns will first observe their classes and report back on mentions of cheating and academic integrity and interns will later interview classmates and teachers about hypothetical cheating events and record their responses and reactions. This study will start in the 2022-2023 school year.

In the second study, we will manipulate teacher and peer messages to examine the influence of these messages on judgments and decisions about cheating. This study will start at least one year after the first study.

The studies are aimed at advancing knowledge surrounding the following research questions:

(1) What are teachers’ and peers’ messages about cheating?

(2) Do teachers’ and peers’ messages predict evaluations of cheating?

(3) Do evaluations of cheating predict decisions?

To read more about the details of the studies, you can look at our NSF Proposal or Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science (SIPS) Conference Poster.

The HEROES Project is affiliated with the Social and Cognitive Development Lab (SCDL) directed by Dr. Gail Heyman. This lab is located in the Psychology Department at the University of California, San Diego. High school interns that join the HEROES project will be invited to join SCDL meetings. To learn more about the SCDL, click here.

We chose to focus on high schools in San Diego County because we are based in the Psychology Department at UC San Diego, and we believe the project will be more rewarding for everyone involved by making it an in-person experience. We also chose San Diego County, a diverse region of the US, because our mission is to use research to provide opportunities to a students from a range of backgrounds and ultimately inform and support schools' efforts to promote academic integrity.

At this time, applications to join the HEROES Project are closed. We will update the website in the future if more opportunities open up.