No abstract

Transparency and observability have been shown to foster ethical decision-making as people tend to comply with an underlying norm for honesty. In a die-rolling experiment, we investigate whether observability can have detrimental effects, however, in situations implying a social norm for dishonesty. We thus introduce a norm nudge towards honesty or dishonesty and make participants' decisions observable and open to other participants' judgment in order to manipulate the observability of people's decisions as well as the underlying social norm. We find that a nudge towards honesty indeed increases the level of honesty, suggesting that such a norm nudge can successfully induce behavioral change. Our introduction of social image concerns via observability, however, does not affect honesty and does not interact with our norm nudge.