Does the truth come naturally? Time pressure increases honesty in one-shot deception games

Abstract

Many situations require people to act quickly and are characterized by asymmetric information.Since asymmetric information makes people tempted to misreport their private information for their own benefit, it is of primary importance to understand whether time pressure affects honest behavior. A theory of social heuristics (the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, SHH), predicts that, in case of one-shot interactions, such an effect exists and it is positive. The SHH proposes that when people have no time to evaluate all available alternatives, they tend to rely on heuristics, choices that are optimal in everyday, repeated interactions and that have been internalized over time; and then, after deliberation, people shift their behavior towards the one that is optimal in the given interaction. Thus, the SHH predicts that time pressure increases honesty in one-shot interactions (because honesty may be optimal in repeated interactions, while dishonesty is always optimal in the short run). However, to the best of our knowledge, no experimental studies have tested this prediction. Here, I report a large (N=1,013) study aimed at filling this gap. In this study, participants were given a private information and were asked to report it within 5 seconds vs after 30 seconds. The interaction was one-shot, and payoffs were such that subjects had an incentive to lie. As predicted by the SHH, I find that time pressure increases honest behavior. In doing so, these results provide new insights on the role of time pressure on honesty, and provide one more piece of evidence in support of the Social Heuristics Hypothesis.

The Dual-Process Approach to Human Sociality: A Review

“…The case of honesty is particularly interesting. When players do not initially know the payoffmaximizing strategy, then System 1 promotes honesty (Foerster et al, 2013;Capraro, 2017;Capraro et al, 2019), and this is in line with the predictions of the GSHH. However, when players know the available actions and their consequences since before the cognitive process manipulation, then System 2 promotes honesty, especially when dishonesty harms an abstract other (Köbis et al, in press).…”

Time pressure and honesty in a deception game

“…Two early studies using time constraints to manipulate cognitive mode found that honesty requires deliberation (Gunia et al, 2012;Shalvi et al, 2012). This conclusion was challenged by three more recent studies, two of which found the opposite effect, that time pressure promotes honesty (Capraro, 2017;Lohse et al, 2018), while the third one found a null effect (Barcelo & Capraro, 2017). Studies using different cognitive processing manipulations, such as conceptual priming of intuition (Cappelen et al, 2013), ego-depletion (Gino, Schweitzer, Mead & Ariely, 2011), and cognitive load (van't Veer, Stel & van Beest, 2014) have also led to mixed results.…”

On the heterogeneity of people's (dis)honest behavior along two dimensions: Cost of lying and cost of acquiring information

“…Indeed, we have also conducted a time pressure study (analyzed in the Appendix). This is a significant contribution in itself, because the role of time pressure and, more generally, the role of intuition on honesty has been at the center of the debate in the last years (Andersen et al, 2018;Cappelen et al, 2013;Capraro, 2017;Capraro et al, 2019;Debey et al, 2012;Gino et al, 2011;Gunia et al, 2012;Lohse et al, 2018;Mead et al, 2009;Shalvi et al, 2012;Spence et al, 2001;Van't Veer et al, 2014;Walczyk et al, 2003), as a part of the more general research program of classifying social behaviors according to whether they are intuitive or reflective Cococcioni, 2015, 2016;Capraro et al, 2017;Corgnet et al, 2015;Lotz, 2015;Rand et al, 2012Rand et al, , 2014Rand et al, , 2016Rand, 2016). In our case, time pressure has no effect on the overall rate of honesty.…”

“…In the past decade, economists and psychologists have started studying (dis)honesty using incentivized economic problems (Erat and Gneezy, 2012;Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi, 2013;Gneezy, 2005;Hurkens and Kartik, 2009;Kartik, 2009;Schweitzer, 2014, 2015;Mazar et al, 2008;Sheremeta and Shields, 2013;Weisel and Shalvi, 2015;Wiltermuth, 2011). For example, they have explored the effect on honesty of many exogenous and endogenous variables, such as: demographic characteristics (Abeler et al, 2019;Biziou-van Pol et al, 2015;Cappelen et al, 2013;Capraro, 2018;Childs, 2012;Dreber and Johannesson, 2008;Friesen and Gangadharan, 2012;Erat and Gneezy, 2012); social and moral preferences (Biziou-van Pol et al, 2015;Schweitzer, 2014, 2015;Shalvi and De Dreu, 2014); incentives (Dreber and Johannesson, 2008;Erat and Gneezy, 2012;Ezquerra et al, 2018;Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi, 2013;Gneezy, 2005;Gneezy et al, 2018;Kajackaite and Gneezy, 2017;Mazar et al, 2008); and cognitive mode (Andersen et al, 2018;Cappelen et al, 2013;Capraro, 2017;Capraro et al, 2019;Gino et al, 2011;Gunia et al, 2012;Lohse et al, 2018;Shalvi et al, 2012).…”

“…This decision problem turns out to be particularly interesting also because it opens the way to a completely new set of empirical questions. Indeed, most previous experimental studies on deception implement either binary decision problems -in which subjects get to choose between two strategies, one corresponding to telling the truth and one corresponding to lying (Biziou-van Pol et al, 2015;Capraro, 2017;Gunia et al, 2012) -or decision problems in which there are many different ways to lie, but finding which lie maximizes the payoff is trivial (Cappelen et al, 2013;Erat and Gneezy, 2012;Gneezy, 2005;Shalvi et al, 2012;Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi, 2013;Sheremeta and Shields, 2013). On the contrary, in our case, decision makers can lie in several different ways: they can explore all potential payoffs and then report the piece of information that corresponds to the global maximum; or they can explore only some payoffs and then report a piece of information that corresponds to an early local maximum (a local maximum that can be found easily and quickly -to be properly defined later); or they can explore the payoff corresponding to reporting the truth and then decide to lie only if this payoff is low (in case they decide to lie, they can do it in at least two ways: they can choose the global maximum or they "can stretch the truth", by looking around the truth in search of a profitable deviation); subjects can even be indifferent and pick one choice at random.…”