Abstract
Different ways of description can easily influence people's evaluations and behaviors. A previous study by Bryan and colleagues suggested that subtle linguistic differences in ethical reminders can differentially prevent readers' unethical behavior. The present study aims to replicate the previous finding in the Japanese context, additionally exploring the influence of unfamiliar instruction words that capture participants' attention. In two experiments, which are planned to be conducted online, participants are asked to make 10 coin-tosses and report the number of "heads" results, indicating the amount of money that they can earn. We will manipulate instructions ("Don't cheat" vs. "Don't be a cheater" vs. baseline as a control) for each participant group, including nearly 270 participants (Experiment 1). Next, we will conduct an extended experiment with an additional task in which more attention is directed toward the text (Experiment 2). Through these registered experiments, we examine the credibility of the previous finding that type of instruction affects the occurrence of unethical behaviors.
Highlights
It is not clear to me why the authors decided to replicate Bryan et al (2013)1 among many other studies
Minor comments: 1. Data analysis of the “cheating with task” condition in Experiment 2: If you are going to delete the data of participants who fail to give the right answer to the attention task, this information should be provided in the main text
When participants pay enough attention to the reminder “don’t cheat,” is there still no difference in the dishonesty rate between the cheating group and the baseline group? If the results in our Experiment 1 are the same as those in the original experiment, we aim to explore whether lower levels of attention to the cheating condition reduced the effectiveness of preventing dishonest behaviors in our Experiment 1
Summary
Subsequent research found that “being a helper” can lead to more kind behaviors initially, once there is a setback, the backlash may be stronger (Foster-Hanson et al, 2018) The reason underlying this phenomenon is as follows: as category labels, nouns bear a strong link to identity and may lead to self-doubt once one fails. In Gino et al.’s experiment (2014), participants were asked to complete a scrambled-sentences task using some money-related words or time-related words; results showed that priming time (rather than money) makes people behave more ethically Another experiment by Bryan et al (2013) allowed experimenters to prevent unethical behaviors through semantic priming. We predict that the self-relevant noun “cheater” will curb cheating behaviors more significantly than the verb “cheating” and the baseline condition (in which there is no reminder in the instruction)
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