Benjamin E Hilbig

Universität Koblenz-Landau · Cognitive Psychology Lab

Whereas research focusing on stable dispositions has long attributed ethically and socially aversive behavior to an array of aversive (or ‘dark’) traits, other approaches from social-cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have emphasized the crucial role of social norms and situational justifications that allow individuals to uphold a positi...

The past two decades have seen major developments in the study of behavioral (dis)honesty and its measurement as well as a surge of interest in the location of trait honesty within models of basic personality structure and the role of personality traits in behavioral dishonesty more generally. The present review provides an overview of the correspo...

Evolutionary Psychology has considered a Fast Life History Strategy (FLHS), denoting an individual’s tendency to invest more resources in proliferation than in child-rearing, to be responsible for the emergence of aversive traits. Empirical evidence for this notion has been inconsistent, however. Herein, we tested whether FLHS is an adequate repres...

Individual differences in prosocial behavior have been consistently observed in a variety of contexts. Here, we summarize and critically discuss recent developments in two research agendas on the dispositional basis of human prosociality: a personality approach, proposing a variety of trait concepts and corresponding measures to predict prosocial b...

In clinical psychopathology research, up to seven traits have been suggested as instances of antagonistic psychopathology. Those antagonistic traits, in turn, are commonly viewed as reflections of low Agreeableness as per the Big Five (BF‐AG). However, specific theoretical differences between antagonistic traits suggest that other broad and basic d...

Deception of research participants has long been and remains a hot-button issue in the behavioral sciences. At the same time, the field of psychology is fortunate to have an ethics code to rely on in determining whether and how to use and report on deception of participants. Despite ongoing normative controversies, a smallest common denominator amo...

The deception of research participants remains a controversial issue in the behavioral sciences. Current ethics codes consistently limit the use of deception to cases in which non-deceptive alternatives are unfeasible and, crucially, require that participants subjected to deception be debriefed correspondingly along with an option to withdraw their...

The Dark Factor of Personality (D)—the underlying disposition of aversive traits—has been shown to account for various ethically and socially aversive behaviors. Whereas previous findings support the reliability and validity of the original English item sets suggested to measure D, a thorough psychometric examination of their German translation is...

Models of basic personality structure are among the most widely used frameworks in psychology and beyond, and they have considerably advanced the understanding of individual differences in a plethora of consequential outcomes. Over the past decades, two such models have become most widely used: the Five Factor Model (FFM) or Big Five, respectively,...

Recent research suggests that the common core of all aversive traits can be understood through the Dark Factor of Personality (D). Previously, the overlap among aversive traits has also been described as the low pole of HEXACO Honesty-Humility. Relying on longitudinal data and a range of theoretically derived outcome criteria, we test in four studi...

Aversive personality traits have been linked to risk-taking across various domains. Herein, we investigated whether the common core of aversive traits, the Dark Factor of Personality (D), is related to risk-taking. Whereas the conceptualizations of D (common core of aversive traits) and risk-taking (not inherently socially and/or ethically aversive...

Web-based data collection is increasingly popular in both experimental and survey-based research because it is flexible, efficient, and location-independent. While dedicated software for laboratory-based experimentation and online surveys is commonplace, researchers looking to implement experiments in the browser have, heretofore, often had to manu...

Prosocial behaviors constitute vital ingredients for all types of social interactions and relationships as well as for society at large. Corresponding to this significance, the study of prosocial behaviors has received considerable attention across scientific disciplines. A striking feature of this research is that most disciplines rely on economic...

Enduring patterns of socially aversive behavior are ascribed to stable personality disorders (such as narcissistic or antisocial tendencies) in clinical psychology or to so called “dark” traits in personality psychology. As recently shown, the substantial overlap among the latter constructs is attributable to a single underlying disposition, called...

Comparability of measurement across different cultural groups is an essential prerequisite for any cross-cultural assessment. However, cross-cultural measurement invariance is rarely achieved and detecting the source of non-invariance is often challenging. In particular, when different language versions of a measure are administered to different cu...

People willingly accept personal costs to sanction norm violations even if they are not personally affected by the wrongdoing and even if their sanctioning yields no immediate benefits a behavior known as third-party punishment. A notable body of literature suggests that this behavior is primarily driven by retribution (i.e., evening out the harm c...

Unethical behavior is often accompanied by others covering up a transgressor’s actions. We devised a novel behavioral paradigm, the Unethical Loyalty Game, to specifically study individuals’ willingness to lie to cover up others’ dishonesty. Specifically, we examined (i) whether and to what extent individuals are willing to lie to cover up others’...

Objective: Although dark traits as studied in mainstream personality research and socially aversive psychopathology as studied in abnormal psychology intend to account for the same classes of behavior, their degree of conceptual and, consequently, empirical correspondence has remained limited at best. We aim to overcome this divide by demonstrating...

The Dark Factor of Personality (D) is conceptualized as the basic disposition out of which “dark” traits arise as specific manifestations. We herein critically test this conceptualization across nine dark traits in a 4-year longitudinal study with N = 1,261 ( n = 470 at the second measurement occasion, employing full information maximum likelihood...

The HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised (HEXACO-PI-R) has evolved into one of the most heavily applied measurement tools for the assessment of basic personality traits. Correspondingly, the inventory has been translated to several languages for use in cross-cultural research. However, formal tests examining whether the different language versions...

Previous research consistently showed a negative link between Honesty-Humility (HH) and dishonest behavior. However, most prior research neglected the influence of situational factors and their potential interaction with HH. In two incentivized experiments (N = 322, N = 552), we thus tested whether the (subjective) utility of incentives moderates t...

Current literature suggests that laypeople’s punishment is primarily driven by retributive reasons (i.e., to give offender their just deserts) rather than utilitarian purposes such as special prevention (i.e., to prevent recidivism of the offender) or general prevention (i.e., to prevent the imitation of the crime by others). One explanation for th...

The Dark Factor of Personality (D) has been suggested as the basic disposition underlying dark traits, thereby representing their common core. However, it has also been argued that such commonalities reflect the low pole of Agreeableness. The present study (N=729) employed five established inventories to model the Agreeableness construct and consid...

Based on lexical studies, the HEXACO Model of Personality has been proposed as a model of basic personality structure, summarizing individual differences in six broad trait dimensions. Although research across various fields relies on the HEXACO model increasingly, a comprehensive investigation of the nomological net of the HEXACO dimensions is mis...

A recurrent observation in personality judgments is that individuals’ ratings of others’ personalities are positively linked to their self-description, and that such “assumed similarity” effects appear to be trait-specific. However, the extent of and explanations for assumed similarity have been addressed only insufficiently. To close this gap, we...

The Dark Factor of Personality (D) is the basic disposition that gives rise to specific personality traits related to antagonistic, malevolent, or socially aversive behavior, thereby representing the common core of dark personality traits. Whereas existing evidence clearly supports the conceptualization and utility of D, the assessment of D was pos...

Individuals’ punishment goals depend on the perceived cause of the misbehavior. However, a corresponding attributional model of punishment goals has only been studied in legal domains—but was largely ignored in others, such as the educational domain, in which student misbehavior is a main stressor for both teachers and students. Thus, we investigat...

The six dimensions of the HEXACO Model of Personality are most commonly measured via the HEXACO Personality Inventory(-Revised) (HEXACO-PI(-R)), which comes in three versions (60, 100, and 200 items) and is available as a self- and observer report form in several languages. The present study meta-analytically investigates the psychometric propertie...

Lu, Lee, Gino, and Galinsky (2018; LLGG) tested the hypotheses that air pollution causes unethical behavior and that this effect is mediated by increased anxiety. Here, we provide theoretical and empirical arguments against the generality of the effects of air pollution and anxiety on unethical behavior. First, we collected and analyzed monthly lon...

Objective: Across all subfields of psychology, it is common practice to use different indicators of allegedly the same personality constructs, resting upon the (often implicit) assumption that the indicators measure equivalent constructs. However, there is a lack of approaches allowing for a strict and comprehensive test of the equivalence assumpti...

Psychological accounts of dishonesty propose that lying incurs subjective costs due to threatening individuals’ moral self-image. However, evidence is restricted to indirect tests of such costs, thus limiting strong conclusions about corresponding theories. We present a more direct test of the costs of lying. Specifically, if lying is psychological...

Previous research consistently showed that Openness to Experience is positively linked to pro-environmental behavior. However, this does not appear to hold whenever pro-environmental behavior is mutually exclusive with cooperation. The present study aimed to replicate this null effect of Openness and to test political orientation as explanatory var...

Web-based data collection is increasingly popular in both experimental and survey-based research, because it is flexible, efficient and location-independent. While dedicated software for laboratory-based experimentation and online surveys is commonplace, researchers looking to implement experiments in the browser have, heretofore, often had to manu...

Experimental tasks measure actual behavior when the consequences that follow actions and choices mirror those of real-life behavior. Consequently, choice tasks in consumer research would need to include both costs (losing a previously earned endowment) and gains (actually receiving what was chosen) to structurally resemble real-life consumer choice...

Low rates of pro-environmental behavior (PEB) in the population have been explained by the declining frequency of experiences in nature due to urbanization and digitalization. Previous research investigated whether increasing salience of nature through virtual nature experiences is suitable to foster PEB, however, the evidence is not fully conclusi...

According to seminal utility-based theories of norm-violating and unethical behavior, the decision to lie involves trading-off the potential benefits of dishonesty against the potential costs if caught. However, even in paradigms with zero risk of sanctions, individuals do not consistently cheat. Still more strikingly, most of the few findings avai...

Previous research has established that higher levels of trait Honesty-Humility (HH) are associated with less dishonest behavior in cheating paradigms. However, only imprecise effect size estimates of this HH-cheating link are available. Moreover, evidence is inconclusive on whether other basic personality traits from the HEXACO or Big Five models a...

Many negatively connoted personality traits (often termed “dark traits”) have been introduced to account for ethically, morally, and socially questionable behavior. Herein, we provide a unifying, comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding dark personality in terms of a general dispositional tendency of which dark traits arise as specific...

From the perspective of basic personality models, the HEXACO Honesty-Humility factor has yielded most consistent evidence in accounting for inter-individual variation in prosocial behavior in game-theoretic paradigms. However, both the Honesty-Humility scale and game-theoretic paradigms involve a strong reference to money; thus, the observed link m...

We argue that in addition to the positive effects and functionality of morality for interactions among in-group members as outlined in the target article, morality may also fuel aggression and conflict in interactions between morality-based out-groups. We summarize empirical evidence showing that negative cognitions, emotions, and behaviors are par...

Over the past decades, there has been considerable interest in individual differences in cooperative behaviour and how these can be explained. Whereas the Honesty–Humility dimension from the HEXACO model of personality has been identified as a consistent predictor of cooperation, the underlying motivational mechanisms of this association have remai...

Abstract: Despite convincing counterevidence, misinterpretation of so-called Impression Management, Social Desirability, or Lie scales in low-stakes settings seems to persist. In this reply to an ongoing discussion with Feldman and colleagues (De Vries et al., 2017; Feldman, in press; Feldman et al., 2017), we argue that high scores on Impression M...

Recent developments in personality psychology led to the proposition of two alternative six-factor trait models, the HEXACO model and the Big Six model. However, given the lack of direct comparisons, it is unclear whether the HEXACO and Big Six factors are distinct or essentially equivalent, and whether corresponding inventories measure similar or...

Current theories of dishonest behavior suggest that both individual profits and the availability of justifications drive cheating. Although some evidence hints that cheating behavior is most prevalent when both self-profit and social justifications are present, the relative impact of each of these factors is insufficiently understood. This study pr...

Menschen müssen ständig unterschiedlichste Situationen beurteilen oder Entscheidungen treffen. Dabei können die Informationen mehr oder weniger eindeutig und die Folgen der Entscheidung mehr oder weniger schwerwiegend sein. Die Psychologie erforscht die Struktur von Urteilen und Entscheidungen sowie Einflussfaktoren und Prozesse, die sowohl „gute“...

Most approaches to dishonest behavior emphasize the importance of corresponding payoffs, thus implying that dishonesty might increase with increasing incentives. However, prior evidence does not confirm this intuition. Strikingly, extant findings are based on relatively small payoffs, the potential effects of which are solely analyzed across partic...

Decision strategies explain how people integrate multiple sources of information to make probabilistic inferences. In the past decade, increasingly sophisticated methods have been developed to determine which strategy explains decision behavior best. We extend these efforts to test psychologically more plausible models (i.e., strategies), including...

Under certain circumstances, well-known others (so-called informants) may possess unique insights into targets’ personality traits beyond the targets’ self-views. Specifically, as proposed by the Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA) model, an incremental predictive ability of informants is most likely for traits and corresponding behaviors that ar...

This article shows that the conclusion of Feldman et al.’s (2017) Study 1 that profane individuals tend to be honest is most likely incorrect. We argue that Feldman et al.’s conclusion is based on a commonly held but erroneous assumption that higher scores on Impression Management Scales, such as the Lie Scale, are associated with trait dishonesty....

In previous research, pro-environmental behavior (PEB) was almost exclusively aligned with in-group cooperation. However, PEB and in-group cooperation can also be mutually exclusive or directly conflict. To provide first evidence on behavior in these situations, the present work develops the Greater Good Game (GGG), a social dilemma paradigm with a...

Despite much research on the determinants of trust among strangers, its mechanisms are understood only rudimentarily. Recently, it has been proposed that people trust strangers because they believe they should, thus complying with an injunctive norm even if it conflicts with their preferences. However, given the boldness of this claim and in light...

According to the recognition-heuristic theory, decision makers solve paired comparisons in which one object is recognized and the other not by recognition alone, inferring that recognized objects have higher criterion values than unrecognized ones. However, success-and thus usefulness-of this heuristic depends on the validity of recognition as a cu...

We introduce a novel platform for interactive studies, that is, any form of study in which participants' experiences depend not only on their own responses, but also on those of other participants who complete the same study in parallel, for example a prisoner's dilemma or an ultimatum game. The software thus especially serves the rapidly growing f...

Prominent theoretical constructs such as the Big Five personality factors often inspire the development and use of different inventories. This practice rests on the vital assumption that different indicators equivalently assess the same construct—otherwise, it would often be inappropriate to draw conclusions on the construct level. In comparison to...

Cooperation requires a tendency for fairness (versus exploitation) and for forgiveness (versus retaliation). Exactly these tendencies are distinguished in the HEXACO model of personality which attributes the former to Honesty-Humility (HH) and the latter to Agreeableness (AG). However, empirical dissociations between these basic traits have primari...

Economic games offer a convenient approach for the study of prosocial behavior. As an advantage, they allow for straightforward implementation of different techniques to reduce socially desirable responding. We investigated the effectiveness of the most prominent of these techniques, namely providing behavior-contingent incentives and maximizing an...

Objective: Research suggests that respondents vary in their tendency to use the response scale of typical (Likert-style) questionnaires. We study the nature of the response process by applying a recently introduced item response theory modeling procedure, the three-process model, to data of self- and observer reports of personality traits. The thre...

In paired comparisons based on which of two objects has the larger criterion value, decision makers could use the subjectively experienced difference in retrieval fluency of the objects as a cue. According to the fluency heuristic (FH) theory, decision makers use fluency—as indexed by recognition speed—as the only cue for pairs of recognized object...

One type of paradigm commonly used in studies on unethical behavior implements a lottery, relying on a randomization device to determine winnings while ensuring that the randomized outcome is only known to participants. Thereby, participants have the incentive and opportunity to cheat by anonymously claiming to have won. Data obtained in such a way...

Previous literature has suggested that risky choice patterns in general-and probability weighting in particular-are strikingly different in experience-based as compared with description-based formats. In 2 reanalyses and 3 new experiments, we investigate differences between experience-based and description-based decisions using a parametric approac...

Background Many studies have assessed emotion recognition in patients with Borderline Personality Disorder and considerable evidence has been accumulated on patients? ability to categorize emotions. In contrast, their ability to detect emotions has been investigated sparsely. The only two studies that assessed emotion detection abilities found con...

Overclaiming-in which individuals overstate their level of familiarity with items-has been proposed as a potential indicator of positive self-presentation. However, the precise nature and determinants of overclaiming are not well understood. Herein, we provide novel insights into overclaiming through 4 primary studies (comprising 6 samples) and a m...

Based on recent lexical studies across various languages, Honesty-Humility has been suggested as a sixth basic factor of personality. Specifically, according to the HEXACO Model of Personality, Honesty-Humility represents individual differences in active cooperativeness – operationalized via the facets sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and mode...

Although Web-based research is now commonplace, it continues to spur skepticism from reviewers and editors, especially whenever reaction times are of primary interest. Such persistent preconceptions are based on arguments referring to increased variation, the limits of certain software and technologies, and a noteworthy lack of comparisons (between...

Trustworthiness is a vital pillar of various social interactions hinging upon trust. However, the underlying determinants of trustworthiness-especially in terms of (basic) personality traits-are insufficiently understood. Specifically, three mechanisms underlying trustworthiness have been proposed: unconditional kindness, positive reciprocity, and...

Trust is a key aspect of various social interactions. Correspondingly, trust has been heavily studied across different scientific disciplines. However, an integration of the diverse research and literature is still missing. Addressing this issue, we review several hundred articles on interpersonal trust among strangers and integrate them into a coh...

Recently, Haesevoets, Folmer, and Van Hiel strongly questioned the comparability and equivalence of different mixed-motive situations as modeled in economic games. Particularly, the authors found that different games correlated only weakly on average and loaded on two separate factors. In turn, personality traits failed to consistently account for...