Intuitive or deliberative dishonesty: The effect of abstract versus concrete victim

Abstract

There has been ongoing debate over whether people are intuitively honest or intuitively dishonest. A recent social harm account was proposed to address this debate: dishonesty is intuitive when cheating inflicts harm on an abstract other while honesty is intuitive when cheating inflicts harm on a concrete other. This pre-registered and well-powered study (n = 764) aims to directly test this account by using a time pressure manipulation. Specifically, we examined whether time pressure (versus self-paced conditions) would lead to increased cheating depending on whether the harmed party was concrete or abstract. The results showed no significant effect of time pressure on cheating behavior. However, the harm-type manipulation produced findings that contradicted those reported in previous studies. Given the low replication rates and reliance on controversial experimental manipulations in this area, our findings underscore the importance of further pre-registered research to rigorously evaluate the roles of time pressure and social harm in shaping intuitive (dis)honesty.

Fig 1. The flow diagram of the experiment.

In the matching phase, participants will be randomly assigned to one of four conditions (time pressure with concrete victim, time pressure with abstract victim, self-paced with concrete victim, and self-paced with abstract victim). A) the participants could complete the task and report the first dice point with no time limit. B) participants need to complete the task and report the number of the first die within 13 seconds.

Fig 2. A) Violin plot of rating scores (1 = not affected at all; to 5 = extremely affected) on manipulation check questions for time-pressure and self-paced conditions, concrete harm and abstract harm conditions.

Rectangular boxes represent the interquartile range of the distribution; the horizontal line in the middle represents the mean. The width of each plot shows the density of the data. B) The bar chart of the cheating rates in the four conditions. C) Distribution histogram of time used by time pressure group and self-paced group across different stages of the task.

Fig 3. A) The heatmap of the first toss point and the report toss point.

B) The ratio of cheating to honesty across the participants over morality identity under time pressure and self-paced conditions. C) The bar chart of the cheating magnitude in the four conditions.