In numerous experiments unethical behavior has been found, yet mainly among university students. Using student participants is potentially problematic for generalizability and resulting policy recommendations. In this paper, I report on an experiment with potential dishonesty. The experiment was completed by a representative non‐student sample and a student sample. The results show that cheating does exist, but also that students cheat systematically more, suggesting that focusing on students as participants tends to overestimate the magnitude of cheating. I further find that age is an important explanation for this difference in dishonesty. The older the participants are, the less they cheat.