The Dishonesty of Honest People

Focus on two mechanisms that people employ to maintain their positive self-concept: digitization and attention to standards. 2. Overview of Theory and Hypothesis Theory”. The theory of self-concept maintenance suggests that people typically act dishonestly and achieve external benefits from said acts, but only to the extent that their behavior stills allows them to maintain a positive view of themselves in terms of being honest. Hypothesis: The stuffs main hypothesis stems from the theory of self- concept maintenance (explained above). People facing this motivational dilemma – gaining from cheating vs.. Maintaining a positive self-concept as honest individuals – tend to solve it adaptively by finding a balance between he two motivating forces. They do so in order to acquire some financial benefit from behaving dishonestly while still maintaining their positive self- concept. 1 . The band of acceptable dishonesty is limited by internal reward considerations. 2. The size of this band depends on one’s ability to categorize actions as something other than dishonest, as well as the attention that they pay to their standards for honesty at the time of the dishonest act.
Although there may be many ways to find such a compromise, the study focuses on two particular means; categorization and attention to standards. Categorization: The study explains, ‘When this mechanism is activated, people can categorize their actions in more compatible terms, find rationalizations for their actions, and ultimately avoid triggering any negative self-signals that might affect their self-concept, which will therefore not get updated”. Two important aspects of categorization are its relative ease and its limit. The exact ease/difficult of an act is typically defined by its context.
The study uses the following example – “Intuition suggests that it is easier to steal a OIC pencil from a friend than to teal OIC out of this friend’s wallet to buy a pencil, because the former scenario offers more possibilities to categorize the action in terms that are compatible with friendship (he took a pencil from me once; this is what friends do). ” It also suggests that one’s ability to categorize acts has a limit beyond which people can no longer deny their obvious wrongdoings. The study seeks to define said threshold.

Attention to Standards: When people are mindful Of their own moral standards any dishonest action is more likely to be reflected in their self- concept (they will update their self-concept as a consequence of their actions), which in turn will cause them to adhere to a stricter definition of an honest and a dishonest act. However, when individuals are not mindful of their own moral standards their actions are not measured relative to them, and therefore their self-concept is less likely to be updated, and their behavior is likely to diverge from their standards.
Thus, the attention to standards mechanism predicts that in cases in which ones moral standards are more accessible, people will have to confront the meaning of their actions more readily and therefore be more honest. SUMMARY PHI: Dishonesty will increase as individuals pay less attention to their own standards for honesty. PH: Dishonesty will increase when individuals face situations that are more easily categorized in honesty-compatible terms. PH: Given the opportunity to be dishonest, individuals will be dishonest up to a level that does not force them to update their self-concept. . Overview of Methodology Experiment 1: Moral Reminder Two hundred twenty-nine students participated in this experiment, which consisted of a two-task paradigm as part of a broader experimental session with multiple, unrelated paper-and-pencil tasks that appeared together in a toilet. 1 . In the first task, respondents were asked to either write down the names of 10 books they had read in high school (no moral reminder) or the Ten Commandments (moral reminder). They had two minutes to complete this task. . In the second task each student received two sheets of paper: a test sheet and an answer sheet. The test sheet consisted of 20 matrices. Participants had four minutes in which to find two numbers per matrix that added up to 10. Experiment 2: Honor Code Two hundred seven students participated in this experiment. Two factors between participants were manipulated: the amount earned per correctly loved matrix (ICC and $2) and the attention to standards (control, recycle, recycle+honor code). 1.
The control and recycle conditions were identical to those in the previous experiment, except this time, the experimenter paid each participant, and the task lasted five minutes. 2. The recycle+honor code condition was similar to the recycle condition except that respondents were asked to sign a statement appearing at the top of the test sheet that read: “l understand that this short survey falls under Mitt’s [Yale’s] honor system”; below the statement, participants printed and signed their names.
Thus, the nor code statement appeared on the same sheet as the matrices, and this sheet was recycled before participants submitted their answer sheets. Experiment 3: Token Exchange Four hundred fifty students participated in this experiment. Participants had five minutes to complete this task and were promised SOC for each correctly solved matrix. Three be;en-subjects conditions were used: the control and recycle conditions that we used in Experiment 2, and a recycle+token condition.
The latter condition was similar to the recycle condition, except that participants knew that each correctly solved matrix would earn them 1 ken, which they would exchange for ICC a few seconds later. When the five minutes ended, participants in the recycle+token condition recycled their test sheet and submitted only their answer sheet to an experimenter, who gave them the corresponding number of tokens. Participants then went to a second experimenter, who exchanged the tokens for money (this experimenter also paid the participants in the control and recycle conditions).
Experiment 4: Four-Task Paradigm Forty-four students participated in this experiment, which consisted of a four- task paradigm-?a matrix task, a personality test, a prediction task, and a second matrix task. 1 . Matrix 1: The same control and recycle conditions Of the matrix task from Experiment 2 were repeated. Participants randomly assigned to either of these two conditions had five minutes to complete the task and received SOC per correctly solved matrix.
The only difference from Experiment 2 was that all participants (notes those in the recycle condition) were asked to report how many matrices they had solved correctly. Participants in the control condition submitted both the test and the answer sheets to the experimenter, who verified their answers. Those in the recycle notation recycle their test and just handed in their answers. 2. Personality Test: 10-item tests were handed out, and embedded in these tests was two questions related to self-definition as it relates to honesty.
One question asked how honest a person they considered themselves to be on a scale from O (not at all) to 100 (very). The other question asked participants how they thought of themselves at the time of the survey in contrast to the day before in terms of being a moral person on a scale from -5 (much worse) to 5 (much better). 3. Prediction Task: Participants would next participate in a second vive-minute matrix task. Before taking part in it their task was to predict how many matrices they would be able to solve and indicate how confident they were with their predictions on a scale from 0 (not at all) to 100 (very).
Before making these predictions, it was made clear to participants that the next matrix task left no room to over-claim as the experimenter would check the results. Furthermore, participants were informed that this second test would consist of a different set of matrices, and the payment would depend on both the accuracy of their prediction and their performance. If their prediction was 00% accurate, they would earn ICC per correctly solved matrix, but for each matrix they solved more or less than what they predicted, their payment per matrix would be reduced by C.
The experimenter emphasized that this payment scheme meant that it was in their best interests to be as accurate as possible in their predictions and to solve as many matrices as they could. 4. Matrix 2: The final task was the matrix task (as in the control condition) with a different set of numbers. The entire experiment thus represented a two- condition, between-subjects design, differing only in the first matrix task possibility to cheat).
The three remaining tasks (a personality test, a prediction task, and a second matrix task) were the same for all participants. Experiment 5 One hundred eight students participated in this experiment. Two factors were manipulated between participants: the ability to cheat (control and recycle, as in Experiments 2 and 3) and beliefs about the number of matrices that the average student solves in the time allotted (four matrices, which is the accurate number, or eight matrices which was an exaggeration).
As before, the DVD was the number of matrices reported solved. Experiment 6 This experiment entailed multiple, small sessions, in which each participant sat in a private booth (total of 326 participants). The first part of the procedure remained the same for all four conditions, but the second part varied. All participants received a test with 50 multiple-choice, general knowledge questions, had 15 minutes to answer the questions, and were promised OIC for each question they solve correctly.
After the 15 minutes, participants received a “bubble sheet’ onto which to transfer their answers. The manipulation of the four conditions pertained to the type of bubble sheet ND to what participants had to do with it after transferring their answers. 1 Control: Participants received a standard bubble sheet. When they finished transferring their answers, they handed both the test and the bubble sheet to the experimenter who checked their answers, summed the number of correct answers, and paid them. 2.
No-recycle (first cheating condition): The bubble sheet had the correct answers pre-marked, which prompted a dilemma for participants when they faced a question they had answered incorrectly on their test sheet; they could be honest and mark the corresponding incorrect ricer on the bubble sheet or be dishonest and mark the correct circle. After participants finished transferring their answers, they summed up the number of their correct answers, wrote that number at the top of the bubble sheet, and handed both the test and the bubble sheet to the experimenter, who paid them according to their self-summed score.
In this condition, subjects could cheat with some risk that the experimenter might discover it if she compared the test to the bubble sheet. 3. Recycle (second cheating condition): This condition was similar to the no-recycle condition, with the preference that participants were instructed, after transferring their answers to the pre-marked bubble sheet, to walk to a shredder, shred their original test sheet, and take only the bubble sheet to the experimenter, at which point they would be paid accordingly. Because of the shredding, this condition offered a lower probability of being caught cheating. 4.
Recycle+ (third cheating condition): This condition decreased the probability of being caught even further by instructing participants to shred both their test sheet and the bubble sheet, walk over to a large jar with money at the corner of the room, ND take the amount they earned. In addition, by making the payment “self; service”, the recycle+ condition eliminated any interactions with the experimenter, thereby decreasing social concerns with cheating. 4. Main Findings 1. Given the opportunity, people will engage in dishonest behaviors. 2. Increasing attention to internal honesty standards decreases the tendency for dishonesty. . Allowing more flexible categorization increases the tendency for dishonesty. 4. The magnitude of dishonesty is largely insensitive to either the expected external benefits or costs associated with dishonest acts. 5. People know that their actions are dishonest but do not update their self- concepts. 5. Application Economics: “The theory we propose can in principle be incorporated into economic models. Some formalization related to our theory appears in recent economic theories of utility minimization based on models of self-signaling (Abdomen and Propel 2001 ) and identity (Bnabob and Triple 2004, 2006).
These recent approaches convey a slowly spreading conviction among economists that to study moral and social norms, altruism, reciprocity, or antisocial behavior, we must understand the underlying psychological titivation that vary endogenously with the environment. These models can be adopted to account for self-concept maintenance by incorporating categorization and attention: increasing attention to personal standards for honesty (meta-utility function and salience parameter s 1, respectively) and flexibility for categorization (interpretation function and probability 1-0, respectively).
The data presented herein offer further guidance on the development of such models. In our minds, the interplay between these formal models and the empirical evidence we provide represents a fruitful and promising research direction. Psychology: “Some insights regarding the functional from in which the external and internal rewards work together emerge from the data, and these findings also could provide useful paths for further investigations in both economics and psychology. For example, the results in Experiment 6 showed that increasing the level of external costs (probability of being caught) did not decrease the level of dishonesty.
This finding raises the possibility of a relationship that appears like a step function in which dishonesty up to a certain level is trivial, but beyond that threshold, it takes on a more serious, ND costly, meaning. ” 6. Limitations of Research 1 . Arguably, at some point at which the external rewards become very high, they should tempt the person sufficiently to prevail (because the reward is much larger than the internal costs), such that ultimately behavior would be largely influenced by external rewards. 2.
Another important applied speculation involves the medium experiment. As society moves away from cash, and electronic exchanges become more prevalent, mediums are rapidly increasing in the economy. Again, if we take the results at face value, we should pay particular attention to dishonesty in hose new mediums (e. G. , backdating stocks), because they provide opportunities for under-the-radar dishonesty. Another interesting observation is that the medium experiment did not only allow people to cheat more, but it also increased the level of maximal cheating.
In the medium experiment we observed 24 participants who cheated maximally, which indicated that the tokens not only allowed people to elevate their acceptable magnitude of dishonesty but also liberated some participants from the shackles of their morality altogether. “When we consider the applied implications of these results, we must emphasize that our findings stem from experiments not with criminals but with students at elite universities, people who likely will play important roles in the advancement of this country and who seem a lot like us and others we know.
The prevalence of dishonesty among these people and the finding that on an individual level, the magnitude of dishonesty was typically somewhat honest rather than completely dishonest suggests that we have tapped into what common, everyday behavior is about. As Gladstone and Chin (1993) conclude, people seem to be moral relativists in their everyday lives.