Honesty pledges for the behaviorally-based regulation of dishonesty

Abstract

A common dilemma in regulation is determining how much trust authorities can place in people's self-reports, especially in regulatory contexts where the incentive to cheat is very high.In such contexts, regulators, who are typically risk averse, do not readily confer trust, resulting worldwide in excessive requirements when applying for permits, licenses, and the like. Studies in behavioral ethics have suggested that asking people to ex-ante pledge to behave ethically can reduce their level of dishonesty and noncompliance. However, pledges might also backfire by allowing more people to cheat with no real sanctions. Additionally, pledges' effects have only been studied in one-shot decision making, and they may only have a short-term effect that could decay in the long run, leading to an overall erosion of trust. We explored the interaction of pledges with sanctions and the decay of their effects on people's honesty by manipulating whether pledges were accompanied by sanctions (fines) and testing their impact on sequential, repeated ethical decisions. We found that pledges considerably and consistently reduced dishonesty, and this effect was not crowded out by the presence of fines. Furthermore, pledges seem to exert an effect on most people, including those who are relatively less inclined to follow rules and norms. We conclude that pledges could be an effective tool for the behavioral regulation of dishonesty, reduce the regulatory burden, and build a more trusting relationship between government and the public, even in areas where incentives and opportunities to cheat are high.

Playing the victim behavior: An experimental study

“…Peer and Feldman (2021) also found that pledges are significantly effective across individual differences.…”

“…Beck (2021) finds that subjects who take decisions fast tend to tell the truth more under oath. Peer and Feldman (2021) show that honesty pledges reduce dishonesty significantly and when it is combined with fines, it is more effective. One neutral result is that oaths do not reduce dishonesty on a group level (Krüger and Van Geen, 2016).…”

Committed (dis)honesty: A systematic meta-analytic review of the divergent effects of social commitment to individuals or honesty oaths on dishonest behavior.

“…For example, Bonfim and Silva (2019) found that informing groups that their reported die rolls might be subject to an audit, which would reduce their earnings to zero if caught cheating, reduced dishonesty from 27% to 9%. Similarly, Peer and Feldman (2021) studied the effect of fines and honesty oaths on dishonest behavior. They found that both fines and committing to an honesty oath increased honesty.…”

Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?

“…We assign these future managers to always be in the role of the Sender, and we 1 While the control over the environment offered by a laboratory experiment is better suited to testbed the effect of the oath on future managers, it raises the obvious concern of whether these results would extend to a non-laboratory setting. On this issue, we refer the reader to the literature that correlates lying in lab experiments to unethical behavior in the field (e.g., Potters and Stoop, 2016;Dai et al, 2017;Hanna and Wang, 2017;Cingl and Korbel, 2020) and the ones that investigate both truth-telling behavior under oath in the context of field experiments (Carlsson et al, 2013;Koessler et al, 2019;Jacquemet et al, 2021) ot the long-lasting effects of promises (Peer and Feldman, 2021). 2 An alternative interpretation of the effect of the oath is the idea that it simply primes subjects to truth-telling.…”