Revisiting REVISE: (Re)Testing unique and combined effects of REminding, VIsibility, and SElf-engagement manipulations on cheating behavior

Publication date: Available online 13 April 2019Source: Journal of Economic PsychologyAuthor(s): Christoph Schild, Daniel W. Heck, Karolina Ścigała, Ingo ZettlerAbstractDishonest behavior poses a crucial threat to individuals and societies at large. To highlight situation factors that potentially reduce the occurrence and/or extent of dishonesty, Ayal, Gino, Barkan, and Ariely (2015) introduced the REVISE framework, consisting of three principles: REminding, VIsibility, and SElf-engagement. The evidence that the three REVISE principles actually reduce dishonesty is not always strong and sometimes even inconsistent, however. We herein thus conceptually replicate three suggested manipulations, each serving as an operationalization of one principle. In a large study with eight conditions and 5,039 participants, we link the REminding, VIsibility, and SElf-engagement manipulations to dishonesty, compare their effectiveness with each other, and test for potential interactions between them. Overall, we find that VIsibilty (in terms of overtly monitoring responses) and SElf-engagement (in terms of retyping an honesty statement) reduce dishonest behavior. We find no support for the effectiveness of REminding (in terms of ethical priming) or for any interaction between the REVISE principles. We also report two preregistered manipulation-check studies and discuss policy implications of our findings.
Source: Journal of Economic Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research