Goals, Norms, Attitudes, and Self-Efficacy as Predictors of Academic Dishonesty: Two-Wave Prospective Inquiries into Additive and Multiplicative Effects

Guided by Expectancy-Value-Cost versus Theory of Planned Behavior predictions, we tested how achievement goals, self-efficacy, norms, and attitudes jointly predict academic dishonesty in a preregistered two-wave study of 856 German university students. Appearance-approach goals, descriptive norms, and justifying attitudes positively related to exam cheating and plagiarism, other associations appeared behavior-specific (work-avoidance related only to plagiarism, cheating self-efficacy related more strongly to exam cheating). No interactions with achievement goals were found, favoring an additive risk structure consistent with the Theory of Planned Behavior. Results point to the value of measurement specificity of both predictor variables and behavior types.