Registered Replication Report on Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008)

Abstract

The self-concept maintenance theory holds that many people will cheat in order to maximize self-profit, but only to the extent that they can do so while maintaining a positive self-concept. Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008, Experiment 1) gave participants an opportunity and incentive to cheat on a problem-solving task. Prior to that task, participants either recalled the Ten Commandments (a moral reminder) or recalled 10 books they had read in high school (a neutral task). Results were consistent with the self-concept maintenance theory. When given the opportunity to cheat, participants given the moral-reminder priming task reported solving 1.45 fewer matrices than did those given a neutral prime (Cohen's d = 0.48); moral reminders reduced cheating. Mazar et al.'s article is among the most cited in deception research, but their Experiment 1 has not been replicated directly. This Registered Replication Report describes the aggregated result of 25 direct replications (total N = 5,786), all of which followed the same preregistered protocol. In the primary meta-analysis (19 replications, total n = 4,674), participants who were given an opportunity

When Cheating is an Honest Mistake: A Critical Evaluation of the Matrix Task as a Measure of Dishonesty

“…As we have demonstrated, taking the difference between reported and actual performance conflates cheating with honest mistakes: part of it is due to deliberate deception, but a substantial portion stems from undetected miscalculations. One could mitigate this issue by comparing the reported performance in the control condition with the reported performance in the cheat condition across participants, as did Verschuere et al (2018). However, this approach is only valid if the rate of honest mistakes is the same in both conditions.…”

“…For example, there are serious question marks about the replicability of many so-called behavioral priming effects (Yong, 2012). In fact, the notion that listing the Ten Commandments would reduce cheating, as measured through the matrix task, did not receive any empirical support in a multi-lab, pre-registered replication study (Verschuere et al, 2018).…”

“…All 20 matrices were printed on a single page in four orderly columns. The sheet was modeled after the publically available materials of Verschuere et al (2018), who conducted a large-scale replication study of Mazar et al's (2008) first experiment. However, we only included matrices that were solvable, whereas the latter studies comprised 10 unsolvable items (i.e., no set of numbers added up to 10).…”

“…Furthermore, all of our matrices featured at least one distractor pair, which was defined as a set of numbers that summed to 9.9, 10.1, or 11.0. As such, our materials had three overlapping matrices with Verschuere et al (2018)/Mazar et al (2008, including the very first matrix participants saw, assuming they worked from left to right and top to bottom (i.e., the matrix displayed in Figure 1).…”

The influence of room spaciousness on investigative interviews

“…Particularly, future studies should carefully examine the mechanisms behind the effect. Dawson et al (2017) stemmed from a metaphoric priming approach; however, such priming research should Perceived spaciousness Rapport Room size path c' direct effect, b = -3.03, p = .30, 95% CI [-8.83, 2.76 be approached with caution, as it has generated substantial scepticism in the social psychology field due to failures to replicate (Bower, 2012;Camerer et al, 2018;Verschuere et al, 2018;Yong, 2012). For example, in an effort to replicate Dawson et al's (2017) findings and other well-known priming measures, Dianiska, Swanner, Brimbal, and Meissner (2019) examined the influence of lexical (i.e., word scrambles related to openness concept), contextual (e.g., room decorative posters depicting open settings) and embodiment primes (e.g., interviewers' open or closed off body postures) on information disclosure, failing to find convincing evidence of their influence.…”