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Average marginal effects of honesty oath interventions Overview of average marginal effects based on an ordered beta regression for oath interventions compared to the control (no oath) condition (black dashed vertical line) in percentage point increases in tax compliance. The baseline oath level is shown as a grey dashed vertical line for comparison. The dots depict the average marginal effects, and the whiskers depict 95% CIs without correction for multiple comparisons. The asterisks define statistically significant interventions (based on adjusted P values, two-tailed): *Padj < .05; **Padj < .01; ***Padj < .001. Number of participants: for the control condition, n = 953; (0) n = 955; (1) n = 999; (2) n = 939; (3) n = 993; (4) n = 994; (5) n = 980; (6) n = 1,003; (7) n = 956; (8) n = 1,032; (9) n = 944; (10) n = 1,027; (11) n = 980; (12) n = 1,027; (13) n = 984; (14) n = 993; (15) n = 918; (16) n = 975; (17) n = 963; (18) n = 1,013; (19) n = 957; (20) n = 921. The test statistics and effect sizes are presented in Supplementary Table 24.
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Dishonest behaviours such as tax evasion impose significant societal costs. Ex ante honesty oaths—commitments to honesty before action—have been proposed as interventions to counteract dishonest behaviour, but the heterogeneity in findings across operationalizations calls their effectiveness into question. We tested 21 honesty oaths (including a ba...
Citations
... First, considering the potential to report up to 12 successful guesses, whereas the expected number under perfect honesty is 2 and the actual mean number in the pooled sample is 5.97, 0.5 guesses is subjectively considered a reasonable SESOI. Alternatively, a recent, large-scale study of honest behavior used a SESOI of Cohen's d =.075, which in our data represents 0.2622 guesses (Zickfeld et al. 2024 To present the results of study 5 graphically, the three measures of honesty (no. there is no association between individual honest behavior and PSM in these data (controlling for experimental condition and country fixed effects) (see Supplementary Table 13 for details), nor between collaborative honest behavior and PSM (Supplementary Table 14). ...
Honest behavior of public sector workers is an important quality of governance, impacting the functioning of government institutions, the level of corruption, economic development and public trust. Scholars often assume that honesty is inherent to public sector culture, however empirical evidence on the causal effect of public sector culture on honest behavior is lacking. This research addresses this question by estimating the causal effect of priming public sector identity on the honest behavior of public employees. We validated an instrument for priming public sector identity, and employed it in five preregistered incentivized experiments among civil servants in Germany, Israel, Italy, Sweden and the UK (N=2,827). We find no evidence for the effect of public sector culture on honest behavior in both individual (four studies) and collaborative (one study) tasks. The theoretical implications of these results for the study of moral behavior in the public sector are discussed.
In this article, we test and compare several message-based nudges designed to promote civil discourse and reduce the circulation of harmful content such as hate speech. We conducted a large pre-registered experiment (N = 4,081) to measure the effectiveness of seven nudges: making descriptive norms, injunctive norms, or personal norms salient, cooling down negative emotions, stimulating deliberation or empathy, and highlighting reputation. We used an online platform that reproduces a social media newsfeed and presented the nudge as a message when entering the platform. Our findings indicate that none of the nudges significantly impacts participants’ engagement with harmful content. At the same time, nudges making descriptive norms salient selectively increase participants’ overall engagement with relatively harmless content. Additionally, making injunctive norms salient increased the likelihood of liking harmless posts. Exploratory text analysis also reveals that highlighting reputation leads to more substantial and coherent comments on harmful posts. These results suggest that nudges that activate norm considerations represent a promising approach to promoting civil discourse and making social media a safer and more inclusive space for all.
