Authorities and managers often rely on individuals and businesses' self-reports and employ various forms of honesty declarations to ensure that those individuals and businesses do not over-claim payments, benefits, or other resources. While previous work has found that honesty pledges have the potential to decrease dishonesty, effects have been mixed. We argue that understanding and predicting when honesty pledges are effective has been obstructed due to variations in experimental designs and operationalizations of honesty pledges in previous research. Specifically, we focus on the role of whether and how an ex-ante honesty pledge asks individuals to identify (by ID, name, initials) and how much involvement the pledge requires from the individual (low: just reading vs. high: re-typing the text of the pledge). In four pre-registered online studies ( > 5000), we systematically examine these two dimensions of a pledge to find that involvement is often more effective than identification. In addition, low involvement pledges, without any identification, are mostly ineffective. Finally, we find that the effect of a high (vs. low) involvement pledge is relatively more persistent across tasks. Yet, repeating a low involvement pledge across tasks increases its effectiveness and compensates for the lower persistency across tasks. Taken together, these results contribute both to theory by comparing some of the mechanisms possibly underlying honesty pledges as well as to practice by providing guidance to managers and policymakers on how to effectively design pledges to prevent or reduce dishonesty in self-reports.

中文翻译：

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承诺如何减少不诚实：参与和识别的作用


当局和管理者经常依赖个人和企业的自我报告，并采用各种形式的诚实声明，以确保这些个人和企业不会过度索取付款、福利或其他资源。虽然之前的研究发现诚实承诺有可能减少不诚实行为，但效果好坏参半。我们认为，由于先前研究中诚实承诺的实验设计和操作化的差异，理解和预测诚实承诺何时有效已受到阻碍。具体来说，我们重点关注事前诚实承诺是否以及如何要求个人进行身份识别（通过 ID、姓名、首字母缩写）以及该承诺需要个人参与多少（低：仅阅读 vs. 高：重新识别）。输入承诺文本）。在四项预先注册的在线研究（> 5000）中，我们系统地检查了承诺的这两个维度，发现参与往往比认同更有效。此外，低参与承诺且没有任何标识，大多是无效的。最后，我们发现高（相对于低）参与承诺的效果在不同任务中相对更持久。然而，在任务中重复低参与度承诺可以提高其有效性，并弥补任务中较低的持久性。总而言之，这些结果不仅通过比较可能构成诚实承诺的一些机制来促进理论，还通过为管理者和政策制定者提供有关如何有效设计承诺以防止或减少自我报告中的不诚实行为的指导来促进实践。