Are people more honest than we think?

Does a lack of resources make people more willing to lie to benefit themselves? According to new work led by Lau Lilleholt at the University of Copenhagen, most people (or at least, most of the Danish adult participants in this study) believe this to be the case. In fact, this is also what the researchers themselves predicted they would find while investigating how resource scarcity affects people's decisions. 

Contrary to their expectations, however, they found consistent evidence to the contrary.  

'Resource scarcity' can come in various forms. We might feel that we don't have enough time to accomplish our goals, or space to live in, or money to spend. Previous research has linked financial poverty to higher levels of conflict, corruption, and crime. And, according to standard economic models, people living in poverty should have a greater incentive to engage in self-serving dishonesty, since the potential gains would be more valuable to them. 

From a psychological perspective, however, a stress-induced 'scarcity mindset' may also explain why a lack of resources could encourage people to lie for personal gain. It has been proposed that individuals with this mindset focus mainly on their needs and as a result can find it harder to exert self-control. 

For all these reasons, the researchers expected that putting people in a state of resource scarcity would encourage self-serving dishonesty.

In their first study, 1,219 UK-based adults were asked to solve a letter-identification task in which they had to guess all the letters in an unknown 10-letter word. They were told that if successful, they would receive a bonus 50p on top of an 80p participation fee. One group was given 18 guesses. This was the 'non-scarcity' condition. The other, 'scarcity' group was given just 12 guesses. 

After being told what the task would entail, all the participants were then given an opportunity to 'win' five additional guesses. This came in the form of a 'game', in which they wrote down in private a number between one and eight, and then a number in that range flashed up on the screen. If they reported getting a match, they were given those extra guesses. The researchers were not able to tell which individuals lied about getting a match, but given that each person had a one in eight chance of securing a match, they were able to assess levels of lying at a group level. 

The results showed that participants in the scarcity group were much less likely to guess all the letters and win the bonus 50p. However, they were no more likely to have cheated on the number game to secure extra guesses. 

In a subsequent study with 1,482 British participants, the team varied the number of extra guesses that could be secured, depending on the size of the lie they were willing to tell. But again, though participants in the scarcity condition had far more to gain from lying than those in the other group, they were no more likely to do so. 

The team also explored whether experimentally inducing a scarcity mindset, by getting participants to reflect on the implications of a sudden requirement to pay a substantial expense, would make people more likely to lie on the number-matching game to achieve a bonus 50p. It did not. 

Next, they turned their attention to country-level poverty data from the World Bank and also country-level indicators of self-serving dishonesty, from a meta-study from 2019. This meta-study included more than 44,000 participants from 47 countries, all of whom were given an opportunity to lie in order to gain a financial benefit. Lilleholt and her colleagues found no evidence that people in poorer countries were more likely to have lied. 

Though these studies are relatively extensive, they do have some limitations. For one, the simple online games used in the experiments are very different to the challenges that we face in the real world. Success in these games would have meant very little to the participants. And as research shows that most people tend towards honesty, and that the self-concept of being an honest person is important to many of us, 50p may have been far too small an amount to induce lying.

However, the team does also suggest that at least part of the reason why their Danish adult participants believed that poverty would lead to more self-serving dishonesty may be because they under-estimated how much others — and potentially people in a state of resource scarcity, in particular — value honesty and care about maintaining an honest self-concept. 

More work is clearly needed to understand the full picture, but these findings do suggest that self-serving dishonesty may not be as common as we think.

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001355