No Evidence That Moral Reminders Reduce Cheating Behavior, Replication Effort Concludes

Authored by psychologicalscience.org and submitted by mvea
image for No Evidence That Moral Reminders Reduce Cheating Behavior, Replication Effort Concludes

Scientists report they were unable to reproduce the results of a well-known study showing that people are less likely to cheat on a task after making a list of the Ten Commandments. Their findings are published in a Registered Replication Report (RRR) in Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

The RRR, led by Bruno Verschuere from the University of Amsterdam and Ewout Meijer from the University of Maastricht, presented primary analyses of data from a total of 4,674 participants collected by 19 participating labs. The RRR aimed to replicate a 2008 study in which researchers Nina Mazar, On Amir, and Dan Ariely asked participants to recall either the Ten Commandments or 10 books they had read before completing a separate problem-solving task.

Data from the original study indicated that participants who had thought about the Ten Commandments, a moral reminder, were less likely to exaggerate when self-reporting how many problems they had solved compared with those who had been prompted to think about books. The findings provided support for self-concept maintenance theory, which holds that people seek personal gain so long as they can maintain a positive self-image while doing so.

Verschuere and Meijer developed the RRR protocol in consultation with Mazar, Amir, and Ariely, who provided the materials used in the original study and feedback on the study design. The protocol was preregistered and made publicly available online – data from participating research teams were included in RRR analyses as long as the teams followed the protocol and met the preregistered criteria for inclusion.

The RRR data showed that the moral reminder had no observable effect on cheating behavior for participants who self-reported their problem-solving performance. Among the participants who had the opportunity to cheat, those who were asked to list the Ten Commandments reported solving about 0.11 more problems than their peers who listed books they had read. This stands in contrast with findings from the original study, which showed that participants who had thought about the Ten Commandments reported solving 1.45 fewer problems than their peers.

Although the participating research teams were located in various countries (including the US), there was little variation in their findings. This suggests that the features of the individual replication attempts and participants are unlikely to explain the overall RRR finding.

However, there may be other factors that could explain the divergent results.

“There are always differences between an original study and replication research. You cannot step in the same river twice,” says Verschuere. “For instance, the original study was conducted more than a decade ago at an elite university. The perceived rewards, the perceived probability of getting caught and the perceived consequences of getting caught may have been different for participants in our replication study. But we also need to consider the possibility that the effect does not exist, and that the original result was a chance finding.”

In a commentary accompanying the RRR, Amir, Mazar, and Ariely write that they are “grateful for the continued investigation and inquiry into a topic that we believe is not only important but also highly relevant in today’s world.”

They note that there are several possible reasons why the results detailed in the RRR might diverge from those of the original study, including the smaller testing group sizes. Also, participants may simply be more aware of research on dishonesty compared with those who participated in the original study a decade ago, they said.

According to Verschuere, the results show the importance of replication research.

“The psychological theory of cheating is very appealing, but we need more replication research to establish the reliability of its empirical basis,” he concludes.

The RRR and accompanying commentary are available online.

wtfburritoo on September 5th, 2018 at 00:29 UTC »

That study is inherently flawed to begin with. It makes the assumption that the Ten Commandments actually hold some significance to all participants, which they almost certainly do not.

TheRainbowpill93 on September 4th, 2018 at 23:25 UTC »

The study was far too dependent on people being religious enough to even “care” about the Ten Commandments.

mvea on September 4th, 2018 at 23:24 UTC »

The title of the post is a copy and paste from the title and first paragraph of the linked academic press release here :

No Evidence That Moral Reminders Reduce Cheating Behavior, Replication Effort Concludes

Scientists report they were unable to reproduce the results of a well-known study showing that people are less likely to cheat on a task after making a list of the Ten Commandments.

Journal Reference:

Bruno Verschuere, Ewout H. Meijer, Ariane Jim, Katherine Hoogesteyn, Robin Orthey, Randy J. McCarthy, John J. Skowronski, Oguz A. Acar, Balazs Aczel, Bence E. Bakos, Fernando Barbosa, Ernest Baskin, Laurent Bègue, Gershon Ben-Shakhar, Angie R. Birt, Lisa Blatz, Steve D. Charman, Aline Claesen, Samuel L. Clay, Sean P. Coary, Jan Crusius, Jacqueline R. Evans, Noa Feldman, Fernando Ferreira-Santos, Matthias Gamer, Sara Gomes, Marta González-Iraizoz, Felix Holzmeister, Juergen Huber, Andrea Isoni, Ryan K. Jessup, Michael Kirchler, Nathalie klein Selle, Lina Koppel, Marton Kovacs, Tei Laine, Frank Lentz, David D. Loschelder, Elliot A. Ludvig, Monty L. Lynn, Scott D. Martin, Neil M. McLatchie, Mario Mechtel, Galit Nahari, Asil Ali Özdoğru, Rita Pasion, Charlotte R. Pennington, Arne Roets, Nir Rozmann, Irene Scopelliti, Eli Spiegelman, Kristina Suchotzki, Angela Sutan, Peter Szecsi, Gustav Tinghög, Jean-Christian Tisserand, Ulrich S. Tran, Alain Van Hiel, Wolf Vanpaemel, Daniel Västfjäll, Thomas Verliefde, Kévin Vezirian, Martin Voracek, Lara Warmelink, Katherine Wick, Bradford J. Wiggins, Keith Wylie, Ezgi Yıldız.

Registered Replication Report on Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008).

Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 2018; 251524591878103

DOI: 10.1177/2515245918781032

Link: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2515245918781032

Abstract

The self-concept maintenance theory holds that many people will cheat in order to maximize self-profit, but only to the extent that they can do so while maintaining a positive self-concept. Mazar, Amir, and Ariely (2008, Experiment 1) gave participants an opportunity and incentive to cheat on a problem-solving task. Prior to that task, participants either recalled the Ten Commandments (a moral reminder) or recalled 10 books they had read in high school (a neutral task). Results were consistent with the self-concept maintenance theory. When given the opportunity to cheat, participants given the moral-reminder priming task reported solving 1.45 fewer matrices than did those given a neutral prime (Cohen’s d = 0.48); moral reminders reduced cheating. Mazar et al.’s article is among the most cited in deception research, but their Experiment 1 has not been replicated directly. This Registered Replication Report describes the aggregated result of 25 direct replications (total N = 5,786), all of which followed the same preregistered protocol. In the primary meta-analysis (19 replications, total n = 4,674), participants who were given an opportunity to cheat reported solving 0.11 more matrices if they were given a moral reminder than if they were given a neutral reminder (95% confidence interval = [−0.09, 0.31]). This small effect was numerically in the opposite direction of the effect observed in the original study (Cohen’s d = −0.04).