Intuitive Honesty Versus Dishonesty: Meta-Analytic Evidence

Abstract

Is self-serving lying intuitive? Or does honesty come naturally? Many experiments have manipulated reliance on intuition in behavioral-dishonesty tasks, with mixed results. We present two meta-analyses (with evidential value) testing whether an intuitive mind-set affects the proportion of liars ( k = 73; n = 12,711) and the magnitude of lying ( k = 50; n = 6,473). The results indicate that when dishonesty harms abstract others, promoting intuition causes more people to lie, log odds ratio = 0.38, p = .0004, and people to lie more, Hedges’s g = 0.26, p < .0001. However, when dishonesty inflicts harm on concrete others, promoting intuition has no significant effect on dishonesty ( p > .63). We propose one potential explanation: The intuitive appeal of prosociality may cancel out the intuitive selfish appeal of dishonesty, suggesting that the social consequences of lying could be a promising key to the riddle of intuition’s role in honesty. We discuss limitations such as the relatively unbalanced distribution of studies using concrete versus abstract victims and the overall large interstudy heterogeneity.

Requiem for a Nudge: Framing effects in nudging honesty

“…Policy makers seek to use the most effective interventions and tailor those to the settings in which they operate, though our results cast doubt on the effectiveness of negatively framed norm-messages. To increase good behavior, stronger interventions should be considered that involve social and/or economic incentives (see, e.g., Bolton et al, 2019), which should be studied both in the lab and in the field to address challenges with respect to disentangling the underlying mechanisms for deviant behavior using this and related cheating paradigms (see extensive discussions and results presented in, e.g., Hao and Houser, 2017;Abeler et al, 2019;Gerlach et al, 2019;Köbis et al, 2019).…”

“…To achieve this, we capitalize on the 'cheat in your mind' paradigm (Jiang, 2013) for the reporting decisions in our experiment. Using this paradigm over the congeneric die-paradigm (e.g., Shalvi et al, 2011;Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi, 2013) or other related tasks capturing deviant behavior (e.g., Buckenmaier et al, 2019;Dimant, 2019, for an overview see also Abeler et al, 2019;Gerlach et al, 2019;Köbis et al, 2019) has the methodological advantage that participants cannot be worried that their lying behavior is verifiable by anyone, including the experimenter. This is known to matter to the participants, e.g.…”

The intuitive cooperation hypothesis revisited: a meta-analytic examination of effect size and between-study heterogeneity

“…Finally, we would also note that absence of imbalance would not in itself amount to evidence against the selection-bias argument, as balance tests do not have 100% statistical power-and not all factors imbalanced between treatments are measured. In choosing to include non-compliant participants in our main analysis, we also follow recent meta-analyses in this literature (Fromell et al 2018;Köbis et al 2019;Rand 2019).…”

The dual-process approach to human sociality: Meta-analytic evidence for a theory of internalized heuristics for self-preservation

“…In the latter case, promoting Type 1 over reflection has no effect on dishonest behaviour. Köbis et al (2019) interpreted these results in lights of the Social Heuristics Hypothesis: when lying harms abstract others, the negative consequences of lying are not salient and participants tend to act in a self-interested way; 17 in contrast, when lying harms concrete others and the negative consequences of lying are salient, self-interest conflicts with the intuitive social heuristics "do not harm", that pushes in the opposite direction, and nullifies the effect of promoting intuition on dishonesty.…”

“…Since Köbis et al's (2019) meta-analysis suggests that the effect of Type 1 and Type 2 processing on honest behaviour might depend on whether lying harms concrete or abstract others, in the analysis below, I distinguish these two cases.…”