For students and educators alike, it's important to think about academic integrity as a learned concept.

Whether in history, social studies, science, or literature, most East Asian students are discouraged from producing original work in an academic setting and instead advised to remember and repeat the ideas of the masters in those subject areas as a form of respect.

nursing students, for example, are focused on the concept of caring for others and illustrate collectivist culture, in both academic study and clinical practice. It is often natural for nursing students to project caring for patients to helping at-risk cohorts in the form of academic collusion.

Students that grow up with this perspective may not understand why citations at the end of a research paper are important; furthermore, citations might even make them feel uncomfortable, as they recognize individual authors above the community as a whole.

A collectivist culture is one that prioritizes the goals and desires of the whole over the needs of the individual. Often in East Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, and China, ideas that are beneficial to and shared by the community are not individually attributed, but rather recognized as universal knowledge.