Telling Kids They’re ‘Smart’ Nearly Doubled Their Cheating, Study Finds

A study published in the Journal of Educational Psychology found that when 5- and 6-year-olds were told they succeeded on a test because they were smart, they were much more likely to cheat on the challenging test that followed than kids who were told they succeeded because they worked hard, got lucky, or found the task easy. Cheating in the “you’re smart” group hit 64.3%, nearly double the rate seen with any other kind of praise.

Researchers from Hangzhou Normal University and the University of Toronto set out to understand something that’s been largely overlooked: how academic dishonesty gets its start in early childhood. Most cheating research focuses on teenagers and college students, leaving a gap in understanding how these habits might take root years before a kid ever faces a real exam.

How the Praise-and-Cheating Study Worked

To figure out what was really driving kids toward dishonesty, the scientists ran three separate studies involving 378 children between 5 and 6 years old, recruited from kindergartens in a large Chinese city. None of the children overlapped between studies, so each experiment involved a fresh group.

Their setup was simple but sharp. A researcher sat down with each child individually and gave them a short math warm-up, then a “pretest.” In the first study, the pretest problems were deliberately ambiguous, each built to have two plausible answers. That let the researcher tell every child they got them wrong, no matter what they actually wrote down. After the failure, children were given one of three explanations: they didn’t try hard enough, they had bad luck, or the questions were just too hard.

In the second study, researchers flipped the script. The pretest problems had clear-cut answers, and every child completed them successfully. This time, kids were told their success was due to being smart, working hard, having good luck, or getting an easy task.

After hearing their assigned explanation, every child then took a genuinely hard math test. Before leaving the child alone in the room for five minutes, the researcher placed an answer sheet on a nearby table with clear instructions not to look at it. A hidden camera recorded what each child actually did. Two reviewers, who didn’t know which explanation any child had received, later watched the footage and agreed 100% of the time on whether a child had peeked and copied.

A third set of studies added a baseline group where children got no explanation at all for their success or failure, just a plain statement that they had gotten the problems right or wrong. This helped researchers determine whether the type of explanation mattered, or whether the act of commenting on performance did.

What the Results Showed

Failure-related explanations barely mattered. Whether children were told they hadn’t tried hard enough, had bad luck, or faced a hard task, their cheating rates afterward looked about the same, ranging from roughly 33% to 52%, with no meaningful differences between groups.

Success-related explanations told a completely different story. Kids who were told they succeeded because they were smart cheated at 64.3%. Compare that to 35.7% for kids told they succeeded through effort, 38.1% for kids told they got lucky, and just 21.4% for kids told the task was easy. When researchers compared the “smart” group with a baseline group that got no explanation, the ability-praised kids still cheated more, confirming that the jump wasn’t simply from talking about performance. It was specifically tying success to being smart.

Praising effort didn’t seem to make kids more honest than getting no feedback at all, either. That complicates a popular assumption in parenting and education circles: that swapping “you’re smart” for “you worked hard” is a simple fix. Effort-praised kids cheated at rates similar to kids who got no explanation whatsoever.

Researchers point to a few possible reasons why success and failure worked so differently. Success paired with an ability label might create pressure to keep up appearances, a fear of losing that “smart” status when a harder challenge comes along. Failure, on the other hand, seems to trigger a different reaction entirely, one that doesn’t leave kids scrambling to protect a reputation through dishonesty.

A few limits are worth mentioning. All participating children came from middle-class, Han Chinese families in one Chinese city, with most parents holding college degrees. The researchers noted that results might look different in other cultural or economic settings, given how much classroom pressure and achievement expectations vary across communities. They also didn’t test a condition where children were told they had failed because they weren’t smart, since it raised ethical concerns about telling young children they lack intelligence.

Why Praising Kids for Being Smart Can Backfire

None of this means praise is bad. It’s that how adults praise matters more than it seems. Telling a child they’re smart feels warm and supportive, and it usually comes from genuine encouragement. But the results hint that this specific phrase might set kids up to protect a reputation rather than build real skills, and protecting that reputation can mean cutting corners the moment things get hard.

As the researchers put it in their own summary of the findings, “we may inadvertently undermine the very character strengths that enable genuine achievement” when adults routinely credit kids’ wins to fixed intelligence. It’s a small sentence, but it carries a lot of weight for anyone who has ever told a kid they’re a natural. The next time a child gets something right, the smarter move might be to avoid making their success all about how smart they are.

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