Review
Toward a taxonomy and review of honesty interventions

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101410Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The empirical evidence on interventions designed to curtail dishonesty is limited.

  • Moral reminders, external commitments, and priming have been used most frequently.

  • Research has prioritized outcome effects at the expense of psychological mechanisms.

  • The description of key design features needs to be more detailed and transparent.

Abstract

What types of honesty interventions have been tested and to what extent? We conducted a systematic literature review of single-element intervention studies designed to curtail individual-level dishonesty and classified the obtained interventions in a taxonomy that encompasses three frameworks: nudging, economic, and internal-reward. We find moral reminders that we classify as educative nudges as well as external commitments (pledges, oaths, honor codes) and priming that we classify under the internal-reward framework to be the most frequently studied interventions, whereas architectural nudges (defaults, sludge) have hardly been developed. Most importantly, we identify two areas for improvement essential for our collective ability to successfully translate and scale honesty interventions: a more thorough examination of the interventions’ underlying psychological processes and precise description of the experimental designs.

Introduction

Over the last two decades behavioral sciences’ research on (im)morality has gained enormous momentum. By now, hundreds of experiments, surveys, and field studies enrich our understanding of the moral sense, which is considered a necessary attribute of human nature [1]. Indeed, Darwin [ [2], p. 67] wrote: “I fully … subscribe to the judgment of those writers who maintain that of all the differences between man and the lower animals the moral sense or conscience is by far the most important.” If moral sense and the ability to act accordingly discern humans from animals, then the ability to override it is truly human as well. Be that as it may, the extensive inquiry into the “dark side” of human behavior means that today much more is known about who, when and why humans behave (dis)honestly, as evidenced by recent meta-analyses (e.g. Refs. [3∗, 4∗∗, 5∗∗, 6]). They identified characteristics of individuals (e.g. gender, age) and context (e.g. tasks used to gauge the propensity to act dishonestly, lie and cheat1) and evaluated the extent to which these characteristics affect degrees of (dis)honesty. Research has also turned to intercultural variations and determinants of (dis)honesty (e.g. Refs. [7,8]).

Still another important development in these explorations of humans' transgressions is the test of interventions designed to curtail dishonesty. Even if only of modest effect, interventions might, when scaled up, offer notable welfare improvements [9] (for a critical view, see Ref. [10]). Turning to a defined subset of this research, our brief review outlines a taxonomy of honesty interventions with the aim to identify which categories of interventions exist, have received what amount of attention and in which context (lab, online, or field and in which national culture). Most importantly, this exercise reveals systemic conceptual barriers in the current state of research in this subfield, limiting its takeaways and thus, broader influence. We hope this brief work can inform researchers' future efforts and offer some guidance—admittedly not quantitative, as a meta-analytical approach is beyond the present scope—for policymakers.

Section snippets

Literature search

In May 2022, a PhD in psychology (Ana Sofia Morais, ASM) searched the Web of Science Core Collection, excluding the four categories Ecology, Evolutionary Biology, Biology, and Zoology, for articles (as opposed to other publication formats like proceedings and chapters) with the search terms “honest” or “cheat” in the title or with a combination of the terms “honest” and either “lying”, “deception”, or “truth” in the title, abstract, or keywords. In addition, the search was limited to articles

Nudging framework

According to Sunstein [20], nudges – interventions that alter behavior in a predictable way without forbidding options or significantly changing economic incentives – fall into two broad categories: educative and architectural nudges. The category of educative nudges generally includes warnings, reminders, and disclosure of facts (such as UV warning signs, fuel economy labels, or descriptive norms). Architectural nudges, in contrast, do not so much rely on the external provision of information

Our taxonomy: types and frequency of honesty interventions

Grounded in these three frameworks, our taxonomy focused on—borrowing Chomskyan terms [27]—the “surface structure” of the interventions, or what they appear to be, leaving psychological processes (i.e. the interventions’ “deep structure”) aside.

Figure 1 reveals the wide range of tested honesty interventions according to our taxonomy. Of note, 22% of the 98 individual study interventions were conducted in the US, 34% in English-speaking countries (including Australia, Canada, UK, and US), and

Insights and limitations

While working on our taxonomy of honesty interventions we had several moments of insight and discovery. Our first one was that it is by no means trivial to find all published studies testing interventions to decrease dishonesty. An honesty intervention may not be the focal contribution of an article and, consequently, may not be found with a query examining title, abstract, or keywords. Ideally, one would use several approaches in addition to querying a database (and with additional search

Conclusion

In order to successfully translate and scale interventions to curtail real-world dishonesty [45], it is important to examine interventions beyond their surface structure. This requires the research field to move beyond a focus on outcome effects and to explicate and test hypotheses about the psychological mechanisms. As the field accumulates more knowledge about the deep structure, complexity will inevitably increase. For example, one and the same intervention may trigger multiple different

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to Ana Sofia Morais for her support in the systematic literature search and the classification of the research articles. In addition, we thank Susannah Goss for her editing work. Note that both authors contributed equally to the manuscript and the order of authors is chosen alphabetically.

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