Too Tired to Tell the Truth: Self-Control Resource Depletion and Dishonesty

By N. Mead, Roy F. Baumeister, Francesca Gino, Maurice E. Schweitzer, Dan Ariely. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2009

679 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The opportunity to profit from dishonesty evokes a motivational conflict between the temptation to cheat for selfish gain and the desire to act in a socially appropriate manner. Honesty may depend on self-control given that self-control is the capacity that enables people to override antisocial selfish responses in favor of socially desirable responses. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that dishonesty would increase when people’s self-control resources were depleted by an initial act of self-control. Depleted participants misrepresented their performance for monetary gain to a greater extent than did non-depleted participants (Experiment 1). Perhaps more troubling, depleted participants were more likely than non-depleted participants to expose themselves to the temptation to cheat, thereby aggravating the effects of depletion on cheating (Experiment 2). Results indicate that dishonesty increases when people’s capacity to exert self-control is impaired, and that people may be particularly vulnerable to this effect because they do not predict it.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7fdcbc54f22142b9d95368dc67341534d5552fe2

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Citations in the corpus

Ego depletion and its paradoxical effects on ethical decision making (2014, background): “For instance, laboratory-based studies (Barnes et al., 2011; Christian & Ellis, 2011; Gino et al., 2011; Mead et al., 2009) employed undergraduate students to test the link between ego depletion and unethical behavior.”
Are liars ethical? On the tension between benevolence and honesty (2014, background): “…have investigated behaviors like cheating on one's taxes (e.g. Shu et al., 2012), inflating self-reported performance (e.g., Mazar et al., 2008; Mead et al., 2009; Ruedy et al., 2013), misreporting a random outcome for financial gain (e.g. Shalvi et al., 2011) and lying to a counterpart to…”
The dark side of consecutive high performance goals: Linking goal setting, depletion, and unethical behavior (2014, background): “, 2009) and the relationship between depletion and unethical behavior (e.g., Christian & Ellis, 2011; Mead et al., 2009).”
Being “in Control” May Make You Lose Control: The Role of Self-Regulation in Unethical Leadership Behavior (2013, background): “Particularly important for the present purposes, research has shown that after an act of self-control, people are less willing to help others (DeWall et al. 2008), are more likely to cheat (Gino et al. 2011; Mead et al. 2009), and more likely to act aggressively (DeWall et al. 2007).”
Unable to Resist Temptation: How Self-control Depletion Promotes Unethical Behavior (2011, background): “This study successfully replicates previous research demonstrating that both trait and state self-control are linked to unethical behavior (Mead et al., 2009; Muraven et al., 2006) using a task that eliminates the possibility of one-sided errors in remembering one’s own performance and in…”