I recently had a conversation with international students in my introductory writing courses about how people across different cultures and educational settings think about academic integrity and plagiarism. Our discussion renewed my interest in this topic and prompted me to read Russikoff et al.’s “Plagiarism as a Cross-Cultural Phenomenon.” Published in 2003, the article is certainly dated (the authors mention Napster), but I think the study it reports on is pretty interesting because it complicates the distinction between Western vs. Eastern and individualistic vs. collectivistic views on plagiarism.

In the study, a total of 645 university students from four countries–U.S., China, Latvia, and Lithuania– were asked to fill out a short survey about their understanding of and attitudes toward plagiarism. The findings largely show that U.S. students considered plagiarism to be more serious and more encompassing than students from the other countries. For example, while 65% of the surveyed U.S. students said that plagiarism is cheating, only 50% of Lithuanian students and 35% of Chinese students agreed. U.S. students were also more likely than the other groups to label actions like directly copying words from another text or copying someone’s ideas without credit as plagiarism. Interestingly, the Latvian students–who had received direct instruction on plagiarism prior to the study–aligned more closely with the U.S. students than with students from neighboring Lithuania. 

All in all, Russikoff et al.’s findings suggest that there are indeed differences in how students from Western and non-Western countries think about plagiarism and cheating. The authors explain that the reason Chinese students and students from post-Soviet states did not think of plagiarism as that big of a deal was because they had been brought up in places where “economic restrictions have historically disallowed individuals from owning personal property, much less from recognizing the abstract and complex notion of intellectual property” (p. 128). The authors also believe that the results of the Latvian students in their study were likely “skewed” (p. 139) because of the direct instruction on plagiarism they had received. Without such instruction, it can be assumed that their responses would have aligned pretty closely with those of their Lithuanian neighbors.

At the same time, the study also shows –to quote Crazy Ex-Girlfriend–that the situation is a lot more nuanced than that. Firstly, a significant proportion of the surveyed U.S. students didn’t seem to fully understand or maybe didn’t buy into a Western definition of plagiarism. For example, about half of them didn’t consider patchwriting or copying another person’s ideas as plagiarism. And a third of them didn’t think that plagiarism was cheating! Mind you, these were all university students who presumably had grown up in the U.S. and had likely had it drilled into them their whole lives that plagiarism is bad, that it’s theft, and that they shouldn’t do it. But perhaps some of them hadn’t been taught about plagiarism as well as the others? Or maybe they just disagreed at a more philosophical level, i.e. thought that ideas are not personal property and therefore can’t be stolen? I can only speculate, because Russikoff et al. did not include any demographic information about their participants (arghh!). 

Whatever caused these unexpected ingroup differences, the fact remains that the U.S. students were not as monolithic as we might have expected them to be. Although, as a group, they expressed more Western and individualistic views on plagiarism than students from post-Soviet and communist countries, many of them thought about authorship and ideas a lot like their Chinese and Eastern European peers did. 

Similarly, the results for the other groups were also complicated. For example, two-thirds of the Chinese students didn’t think that plagiarism was cheating or that copying others’ ideas without credit was plagiarism. But this still means that about a third of them expressed more Western views on plagiarism. And of course, the fact that the Latvian students aligned so closely with the U.S. students was significant too. It could be, as the authors argue, that recent instruction had shaped these students’ understanding of dishonesty and plagiarism. Or it could just show that the participants knew what the researchers wanted them to say, even if the students themselves did not really buy into what they’d been taught. I don’t think we can know for sure.

All in all, this article was an interesting read because it demonstrates some of the cultural differences in how people think about academic integrity and authorship that I talk about in my classes. At the same time, it was also a good reminder that there is a lot of variation and dissent within cultural and educational settings. And when we consider additional variables–e.g., socioeconomic, generational, or technological– the data is likely to get even more fuzzy. For example, I’m curious how Gen Z from the same countries think about these ideas today compared to the students surveyed in 2003, or how AI might change the way even Westerners define authorship and intellectual property. But that’s a topic for another post. Today, I leave you with an entertaining quote from Russikoff et al.:

“You Americans do not own everything! The Internet says www—World Wide Web. We can use whatever we want!” (Russikoff et al., p. 128)