Revisiting the Moral Forecasting Error – A Preregistered Replication and Extension of “Are We More Moral Than We Think?”

Abstract

Predictions about the future are often inaccurate, but the direction of prediction errors may vary. Contrary to research on the intention-behavior gap, where people fail to live up to their future ambitions, a study on “moral forecasting” found that people behaved more honestly than they predicted. Since this interesting prediction error has only been identified in a few studies and the direction of the effect may seem surprising, psychological science could benefit from a high-powered replication. In Experiment 1, we will conduct a close replication using the original cheating task and a general population sample from the same country as the original study (Canada). By extension, we will also include the “mind-game paradigm” as an established deception-free cheating task from behavioral economics, to assess task generalizability. If the primary hypothesis is supported, then we propose a second extension in Experiment 2, by examining whether a cognitive debiasing intervention can reduce the moral forecasting error in a general population sample from the US. As a final extension we will also examine the social dimension of lay beliefs, by assessing whether moral forecasts for other people exhibit the same prediction error as moral forecasts for oneself. In the current experiments, the planned sample size will provide 90% power to detect ¼ of the observed effect size from the original study.