Abstract
The current study tested the boundary conditions of ethical decision-making by increasing cognitive load. This manipulation is believed to hinder deliberation, and, as we argue, reduces the cognitive capacity needed for a self-serving bias to occur. As telling a lie is believed to be more cognitively taxing than telling the truth, we hypothesized that participants would be more honest under high cognitive load than low cognitive load. 173 participants anonymously rolled a die three times and reported their outcomes — of which one of the rolls would be paid out — while either under high or low cognitive load. For the roll that determined pay, participants under low cognitive load, but not under high cognitive load, reported die rolls that were significantly different from a uniform (honest) distribution. The reported outcome of this roll was also significantly higher in the low load condition than in the high load condition, suggesting that participants in the low load condition lied to get higher pay. This pattern was not observed for the second and third roll where participants knew the rolls were not going to be paid out and where therefore lying would not serve self-interest. Results thus indicate that having limited cognitive capacity will unveil a tendency to be honest in a situation where having more cognitive capacity would have enabled one to serve self-interest by lying.
Highlights
Deception — intentionally misleading another person — is an omnipresent phenomenon that at times can greatly facilitate social interaction, but at other times can cause immense harm, pain and have grave financial consequences
We did separate independent-samples t-test with condition as independent and the manipulation check questions as dependent variables. These analyses indicated that participants in the high load condition were thinking of their string of letters more (M = 3.97, SD = 1.60) than participants in the low load condition (M = 2.79, SD = 1.50), t(171) = −4.97, p < .001.3 There was no difference in how good a look participants had at their three rolls between the high load (M = 4.68, SD = 0.69) and the low load condition (M = 4.79, SD = 0.49), t(154.86) = 1.24, p =
The time participants took to submit the page on which they reported the outcome of their first die roll did not differ between the low load condition (M = 7.41, SD = 3.81) and the high load condition (M = 7.23, SD = 4.31), t(171) = 0.28, p =
Summary
Deception — intentionally misleading another person — is an omnipresent phenomenon that at times can greatly facilitate social interaction, but at other times can cause immense harm, pain and have grave financial consequences. Telling a lie often comes with justifications and with biases that permit people to lie (e.g., a self-serving bias) that likely happen out of conscious awareness. Arguably, even these biases may take up some cognitive capacity. We test whether the decision to tell a lie is born out of our intuitive, automatic tendency to do so or whether this unethical behavior is a result of more effortful cognitive processing. We do so by manipulating the availability of processing resources in an anonymous, tempting situation where dishonest behavior is typically observed. We test whether having a limited cognitive processing capacity makes people more honest than when they do have processing resources available
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