Effectiveness of ex ante honesty oaths in reducing dishonesty depends on content.

Dishonest behaviours such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex ante honesty oaths-commitments to honesty before action-have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behaviour, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a baseline oath)-proposed, evaluated and selected by 44 expert researchers-and a no-oath condition in a megastudy involving 21,506 UK and US participants from Prolific.

Commitment to honesty oaths decreases dishonesty, but commitment to another individual does not affect dishonesty.

Social commitment influences our behavior in various ways. Recent studies suggest that social commitment to other individuals or groups can increase dishonest behavior while feeling commitment to moral norms might decrease it. Here we show in a pre-registered series of 7 studies investigating the influence of social commitment on dishonest behavior by sampling 7566 participants across three countries (the UK, the US, and Mexico) that commitment to moral norms via honesty oaths might decrease dishonesty (OR = 0.

Committed (dis)honesty: A systematic meta-analytic review of the divergent effects of social commitment to individuals or honesty oaths on dishonest behavior.

People feel committed to other individuals, groups, organizations, or moral norms in many contexts of everyday life. Such social commitment can lead to positive outcomes, such as increased job satisfaction or relationship longevity; yet, there can also be detrimental effects to feeling committed. Recent high-profile cases of fraud or corruption in companies like Enron or Volkswagen are likely influenced by strong commitment to the organization or coworkers.

How the minimalist model of ownership psychology can aid in explaining moral behaviors under resource constraints.

The model of ownership psychology as a cognitive adaptation proposes that people flexibly navigate cognitive systems of cooperation and competition, thus enabling them to justify unethical behavior. We discuss how this model captures previous accounts of unethical behavior and propose that a disengagement heuristic can help us understand recent findings in the interconnection between scarcity psychology and unethical behavior.

Subjective socioeconomic status and income inequality are associated with self-reported morality across 67 countries.

Individuals can experience a lack of economic resources compared to others, which we refer to as subjective experiences of economic scarcity. While such experiences have been shown to shift cognitive focus, attention, and decision-making, their association with human morality remains debated. We conduct a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between subjective experiences of economic scarcity, as indexed by low subjective socioeconomic status at the individual level, and income inequality at the national level, and various self-reported measures linked to morality.

Morality in minimally deceptive environments.

Psychologists, economists, and philosophers have long argued that in environments where deception is normative, moral behavior is harmed. In this article, we show that individuals making decisions within minimally deceptive environments do not behave more dishonestly than in nondeceptive environments. We demonstrate the latter using an example of experimental deception within established institutions, such as laboratories and institutional review boards.

On the interplay between pain observation, guilt and shame proneness and honesty.

Seeing others in pain can stimulate powerful socio-emotional responses. Does it also make us more moral? In two laboratory experiments, we examined the interplay between pain observation, self-reported guilt and shame, subjective perceptions of pain intensity, and subsequent honest behavior. Watching a confederate perform a moderately painful (vs.

Experiment aversion does not appear to generalize.

Over the past decade, governments and organizations around the world have established behavioral insights teams advocating for randomized experiments. However, recent findings by M. N.

Morality in the echo chamber: The relationship between belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories and public health support and the mediating role of moral identity and morality-as-cooperation across 67 countries.

Believing in conspiracy theories is a major problem, especially in the face of a pandemic, as these constitute a significant obstacle to public health policies, like the use of masks and vaccination. Indeed, during the COVID-19 pandemic, several ungrounded explanations regarding the origin of the virus or the effects of vaccinations have been rising, leading to vaccination hesitancy or refusal which poses as a threat to public health. Recent studies have shown that in the core of conspiracy theories lies a moral evaluation component; one that triggers a moral reasoning which reinforces the conspiracy itself.

Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning.

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions.

Morality in the time of cognitive famine: The effects of memory load on cooperation and honesty.

Though human social interaction in general seems effortless at times, successful engagement in collaborative or exploitative social interaction requires the availability of cognitive resources. Research on Dual-Process suggests that two systems, the affective (non-reflective) and the cognitive (reflective), are responsible for different types of reasoning. Nevertheless, the evidence on which system leads to what type of behavioral outcome, in terms of prosociality, is at best contradicting and perplexing.

Collaborative Cheating in Hierarchical Teams: Effects of Incentive Structure and Leader Behavior on Subordinate Behavior and Perceptions of Leaders.

What facilitates collaborative cheating in hierarchical teams, and what are its outcomes for those engaged? In two preregistered studies ( = 724), we investigated how subordinates are influenced by leaders signaling a willingness to engage in collaborative cheating, and how subordinates perceive such leaders. Participants performed a task in which they could either report their performance honestly, or cheat for financial gain. Each participant was assigned a leader who could choose to check the report's veracity.

Situational factors shape moral judgements in the trolley dilemma in Eastern, Southern and Western countries in a culturally diverse sample.

The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychological and situational factors (for example, the intent of the agent or the presence of physical contact between the agent and the victim) can play an important role in moral dilemma judgements (for example, the trolley problem).

Effectiveness of environmental health and loss framing on household pharmaceutical take-back schemes.

Pharmaceutical pollution poses an emerging environmental and public health problem. Together with increasing medicine use and pharmaceutical manufacturing effluents, improper disposal of household pharmaceutical waste significantly adds to this issue, despite pharmaceutical take-back schemes having been established in many countries. Even where take-back schemes are available return rates remain low.

Self-control or social control - what determines sleep hygiene in bed-sharing couples?

Objectives: To investigate intimate partners' impact on sleep hygiene with focus on the temporal dimension and differential predictors of sleep hygiene in co-sleepers and individual sleepers.

Material And Methods: Habitual co-sleepers and individual sleepers (n=102) completed a cross-sectional, self-report, in-lab, digital survey on sleep hygiene, habitual sleeping arrangement, self-control, depressiveness, and sociodemographic parameters.

Results: The relationship between sleeping arrangement and sleep hygiene in co-sleepers was time-dependent with an initial steep incline and a subsequent plateau at approximately one year of co-sleeping routine.

National identity predicts public health support during a global pandemic.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g.

Drivers and social implications of Artificial Intelligence adoption in healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact people worldwide-steadily depleting scarce resources in healthcare. Medical Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises a much-needed relief but only if the technology gets adopted at scale. The present research investigates people's intention to adopt medical AI as well as the drivers of this adoption in a representative study of two European countries (Denmark and France, N = 1068) during the initial phase of the COVID-19 pandemic.