Faith on Campus: Religiosity Fails to Shield Students from Deviance

Religion is often assumed to act as a moral anchor, keeping young people on the straight and narrow even when temptation looms. A new study from Ghana, however, suggests that the relationship between faith and ethical behaviour among university students is far messier than that simple assumption allows. Researchers at the University of Cape Coast surveyed 313 third- and fourth-year Bachelor of Education Arts students and found that while religiosity was high across the sample, its influence on cheating, moral misconduct and social deviance was selective, sometimes paradoxical, and heavily dependent on who the students were and where they stood in their academic journeys.

The study, published in Discover Global Society, was grounded in Social Bond Theory, the classic criminological framework developed by Travis Hirschi in 1969. The theory holds that people refrain from deviant behaviour because of their ties to conventional society: attachment to significant others, commitment to conventional goals, involvement in legitimate activities, and belief in the moral validity of social rules. Religion, the researchers reasoned, should strengthen all four bonds. It attaches believers to a moral community whose disapproval they fear, commits them to a virtuous identity that would be costly to compromise, involves them in time-consuming prosocial activities, and bolsters belief in a transcendent moral code that condemns dishonesty. If the theory holds, more religious students should misbehave less.

To test this, the team measured religiosity along two dimensions: religious principles, capturing internalised beliefs and moral convictions, and religious practices, capturing observable expressions of faith such as participation in organised religious activities. Deviance was disaggregated into three distinct domains rather than treated as a single blob. Academic dishonesty covered examination malpractice and plagiarism; moral deviance captured ethical transgressions in which personal gain is prioritised over moral standards; and social deviance covered behaviours that undermine institutional and peer norms within the university environment. Respondents answered scenario-based questionnaire items describing realistic ethical dilemmas, rating on five-point scales how much they would engage in or justify the behaviour described.

The analytical machinery was rigorous. The researchers used partial least squares structural equation modelling, or PLS-SEM, a technique well suited to exploratory models with complex relationships and non-normal data. The measurement model passed standard checks: internal consistency, convergent validity and discriminant validity were confirmed using Cronbach’s alpha, composite reliability, average variance extracted, the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the heterotrait-monotrait ratio, with all HTMT values falling well below the conservative 0.90 threshold. Variance inflation factors ranged from 1.480 to 1.986, far beneath the critical value of 5, ruling out multicollinearity. Bootstrapping with 5,000 resamples tested the significance of path coefficients, and interaction terms probed whether sex, age, educational level and religious affiliation moderated the effects of religiosity.

The descriptive results painted a familiar picture of a devout student body. Overall religiosity scored a mean of 3.98 on a five-point scale, firmly in the high range, with religious practices scoring especially high at 4.42. Yet deviance sat at a moderate 3.12, with moral deviance slightly higher at 3.21. In other words, students maintained high levels of religious commitment while still reporting a notable susceptibility to misconduct. The sample itself was predominantly female, at 61.7 percent, overwhelmingly Christian at 87.2 percent, and mostly aged between 21 and 25, with final-year Level 400 students making up two-thirds of respondents.

The structural model delivered the study’s most provocative findings. Contrary to the protective expectation of Social Bond Theory, the significant direct relationships between religiosity and deviance were positive rather than negative. Religious principles showed a significant positive effect on moral deviance, with a path coefficient of 0.209, meaning students with stronger internalised religious beliefs reported greater susceptibility to morally deviant behaviour. Religious practices positively influenced social deviance with a coefficient of 0.180. Neither dimension of religiosity showed a significant direct relationship with academic dishonesty at all. The model explained 30.8 percent of the variance in academic dishonesty, a moderate figure, but only 21.6 percent for moral deviance and 15.3 percent for social deviance, with modest predictive relevance across the board.

How can stronger faith predict more deviance? The researchers offer several tentative explanations rather than definitive conclusions. One possibility is that religious belief may be internalised at a symbolic or identity level without translating into behavioural regulation, so that outward religiosity coexists with weak moral internalisation. Another is that individuals apply moral standards selectively, particularly when personal benefit is at stake. The finding echoes a broader paradox documented in prior research: in highly religious societies, strong public expressions of faith can coexist with elevated corruption, suggesting that religious identity may function as a source of social legitimacy or even moral cover that masks unethical conduct. Concepts such as moral licensing, in which being good frees people to be bad, have been proposed to explain such patterns, though the study did not directly test these mechanisms.

The moderation analysis added crucial nuance, revealing that the influence of religiosity is context-dependent. Sex moderated the link between religious practices and academic dishonesty, with simple slope analysis showing the relationship was strongest among female students and nearly flat among males. Educational level moderated the connection between religious principles and moral deviance, with the association growing stronger as students progressed from Level 300 to Level 400, possibly reflecting a rising tension between dogmatic religious frameworks and the critical thinking fostered by higher education, or increasingly sophisticated rationalisation among senior students. Religious affiliation moderated the effect of religious practices on academic dishonesty, with the relationship strongest among adherents of African Traditional Religion, moderate among Muslims, and weakest among Christians. Age, by contrast, moderated nothing, likely because the sample’s age distribution was too homogeneous to reveal meaningful variation.

The absence of any significant link between religiosity and academic dishonesty carries its own message. Academic dishonesty is often driven by situational pressures such as performance expectations, peer norms and perceived enforcement mechanisms, rather than by individual moral dispositions alone. This suggests that in highly structured academic environments, contextual and institutional factors may swamp whatever protective influence religious orientation might otherwise exert. The authors caution that the statistically significant findings should be interpreted carefully, given the number of effects tested and the small effect sizes observed, which raise the possibility of chance associations.

The practical implications are sobering for university administrators. Promoting religiosity alone, the study concludes, is unlikely to be sufficient as a strategy for strengthening ethical behaviour among students. Instead, institutions should adopt broader approaches to academic integrity that combine ethical education, robust enforcement mechanisms and supportive learning environments, approaches that prior research suggests are more effective than value-based interventions alone. The findings also carry theoretical weight, challenging oversimplified narratives that equate religious commitment with ethical infallibility and supporting more differentiated conceptualisations of religiosity that distinguish between belief systems and behavioural expressions.

The study has clear limitations. Its cross-sectional design precludes causal inference, self-reported measures of sensitive behaviours invite social desirability bias, and the sample, drawn from disciplines that explicitly engage with ethics and religious thought, limits generalisability to other fields. The researchers themselves note that Social Bond Theory was extended rather than directly tested, since religiosity was operationalised through only two constructs that partially map onto the theory’s four bond dimensions. Future work, they suggest, should incorporate longitudinal designs, behavioural tasks, peer reports, personality traits such as honesty-humility, and measures of moral disengagement, alongside qualitative research into how deeply religious students rationalise misconduct.

What emerges is a portrait of faith on campus that resists easy moralising. Religiosity does not exert a uniformly protective influence on student behaviour; it operates in selective and context-dependent ways across academic dishonesty, moral deviance and social deviance, shaped by sex, educational level and religious affiliation in ways that standard theory did not predict. For a country where faith saturates public life, and for universities worldwide grappling with cheating scandals and ethical erosion, the message is that visible piety and ethical conduct are not the same thing, and that safeguarding integrity requires institutional design, not just moral exhortation.

Subject of Research: The influence of religiosity on academic dishonesty and moral and social deviance among higher education students in Ghana

Article Title: Investigating the influence of religiosity on academic dishonesty and moral and social deviance among higher education students

Article References: Mensah, E., Owusu, M., Frimpong, E. A., Nyamekye, E., Ampem, I. O., Kwarteng, S., Dorm, E., & Kwofie, G. N. (2026). Investigating the influence of religiosity on academic dishonesty and moral and social deviance among higher education students. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 232. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00601-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00601-5

Keywords: religiosity, academic dishonesty, moral deviance, social deviance, higher education, Social Bond Theory, PLS-SEM, Ghana, undergraduate students, academic integrity, moderating effects, ethical behaviour