Level of Effort and Economic Dishonesty: Are Expectations Relevant?

TL;DR

This paper explores how people's economic dishonesty is influenced by moral intuitions when the motivation for dishonesty is ambiguous, like effort.

Contribution

It shows that expectations do not affect dishonesty when decisions are driven by ambiguous motivators.

Findings

Levels of dishonesty remain low regardless of participants' expectations.

Moral intuitions guide decisions when justifications are ambiguous.

Expectations do not condition dishonesty in ambiguous situations.

Abstract

Some research has shown that expectations modulate people’s economic dishonesty. These studies have allowed their participants to precisely establish the dishonest extra financial gain, without threatening their image of honesty. In this article, we show that in situations where our economic dishonesty is driven by hard-to-quantify motivators such as level of effort, it is difficult to change the categorization of (dishonest) judgments. Faced with this ambiguity, people make decisions guided by moral intuitions that are not conditioned by changing expectations. We carried out three studies (one single-group study and two experimental between-subjects studies) in which we tested whether the level of deception varies when manipulating expectations of transparency/privacy and dishonesty/honesty. Our results show that the levels of dishonesty remain low, regardless of the participants’ expectations. When our decisions are motivated by more ambiguous factors, in terms of being able to justify ourselves, our economic dishonesty becomes more rigidly directed toward the dictates of our moral intuitions.