Does Honesty Require Time? Two Preregistered Direct Replications of Experiment 2 of Shalvi, Eldar, and Bereby-Meyer (2012)
Ine Van der Cruyssen, Jonathan D’hondt, Ewout Meijer, Bruno Verschuere
Psychological Science · 2020 · Volume 31 · Issue 4
Abstract
Shalvi, Eldar, and Bereby-Meyer (2012) found across two studies ( N = 72 for each) that time pressure increased cheating. These findings suggest that dishonesty comes naturally, whereas honesty requires overcoming the initial tendency to cheat. Although the study’s results were statistically significant, a Bayesian reanalysis indicates that they had low evidential strength. In a direct replication attempt of Shalvi et al.’s Experiment 2, we found that time pressure did not increase cheating, N = 428, point biserial correlation ( r pb ) = .05, Bayes factor (BF) 01 = 16.06. One important deviation from the original procedure, however, was the use of mass testing. In a second direct replication with small groups of participants, we found that time pressure also did not increase cheating, N = 297, r pb = .03, BF 01 = 9.59. These findings indicate that the original study may have overestimated the true effect of time pressure on cheating and the generality of the effect beyond the original context.
Keywords
intuition, cheating, lying, honesty, replication, moral decision making, time pressure, open data, open materials, preregistered
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