Who lies? A large-scale reanalysis linking basic personality traits to unethical decision making

Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2018, Vol 13, Issue 4

Abstract

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 are associated with unethical decision making and whether such effects have incremental validity beyond HH. We address these issues in a highly powered reanalysis of 16 studies assessing dishonest behavior in an incentivized, one-shot cheating paradigm (N = 5,002). For this purpose, we rely on a newly developed logistic regression approach for the analysis of nested data in cheating paradigms. We also test theoretically derived interactions of HH with other basic personality traits (i.e., Emotionality and Conscientiousness) and situational factors (i.e., the baseline probability of observing a favorable outcome) as well as the incremental validity of HH over demographic characteristics. The results show a medium to large effect of HH (odds ratio = 0.53), which was independent of other personality, situational, or demographic variables. Only one other trait (Big Five Agreeableness) was associated with unethical decision making, although it failed to show any incremental validity beyond HH.

Authors and Affiliations

Daniel W. Heck, Isabel Thielmann, Morten Moshagen and Benjamin E. Hilbig

Keywords

Related Articles

Recognition-based judgments and decisions: Introduction to the special issue (II)

We are pleased to present Part II of this Special Issue of Judgment and Decision Making on recognition processes in inferential decision making. In addition, it is our pleasure to announce that there will be a third part...

Biases in casino betting: The hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy

We examine two departures of individual perceptions of randomness from probability theory: the hot hand and the gambler’s fallacy, and their respective opposites. This paper’s first contribution is to use data from the...

On the appropriateness of appropriateness judgments: The case of interferon treatment for melanoma

We compare experts' judgments of the appropriateness of a treatment (interferon treatment for melanoma) on the basis of important attributes of this disease (thickness, ulceration, lymph node involvement and type of meta...

Variations on anchoring: Sequential anchoring revisited

The anchoring effect, the assimilation of judgment toward a previously considered value, has been shown using various experimental paradigms. We used several variations of the sequential anchoring paradigm, in which a nu...

Coming close to the ideal alternative: The concordant-ranks strategy

We present the Concordant-Ranks (CR) strategy that decision makers use to quickly find an alternative that is proximate to an ideal alternative in a multi-attribute decision space. CR implies that decision makers prefer...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP678367
  • DOI -
  • Views 151
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Daniel W. Heck, Isabel Thielmann, Morten Moshagen and Benjamin E. Hilbig (2018). Who lies? A large-scale reanalysis linking basic personality traits to unethical decision making. Judgment and Decision Making, 13(4), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-678367