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Lying and social desirability reduction

To understand the social consequences of unethical behavior (e.g., corruption), we study lying and cheating at the intersection of social psychology and economics. In our research, we are interested in who lies (i.e., which personality traits are predictive of lying) and under what circumstances people lie more or less.

To validly measure unethical behavior, we use simple statistical models that guarantee complete anonymity to experimental participants. This achieves a reduction in socially undesirable response behavior. This is necessary because most people strive to avoid being perceived as liars and cheaters by others. Similar methods for reducing socially undesirable response behavior (especially the "Randomized Response Technique", RRT) are also used in survey research, for example to investigate the prevalence of drug use or doping in competitive sports.

Publications on lying and cheating:

  • Heck, D. W., Thielmann, I., Klein, S. A., & Hilbig, B. E. (2020). On the limited generality of air pollution and anxiety as causal determinants of unethical behavior: Commentary on Lu, Lee, Gino, & Galinsky (2018). Psychological Science, 31, 741–747. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797619866627
  • Heck, D. W., Thielmann, I., Moshagen, M., & Hilbig, B. E. (2018). Who lies? A large-scale reanalysis linking basic personality traits to unethical decision making. Judgment and Decision Making, 13, 356–371. http://journal.sjdm.org/18/18322/jdm18322.pdf
  • Schild, C., Heck, D. W., Ścigała, K., & Zettler, I. (in press). Revisiting REVISE: (Re)Testing unique and combined effects of REminding, VIsibility, and SElf-engagement manipulations on cheating behavior. Journal of Economic Psychology.
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2019.04.001
  • Ścigała, K., Schild, C., Heck, D. W., & Zettler, I. (2019). Who deals with the devil: Interdependence, personality, and corrupted collaboration. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10, 1019-1027. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618813419

Publications on social desirability and RRT:

  • Kaufmann, T. H., Lilleholt, L., Böhm, R., Zettler, I., & Heck, D. W. (2021). Sensitive attitudes and adherence to recommendations during the COVID-19 pandemic: comparing direct and indirect questioning techniques. PsyArXiv. https://psyarxiv.com/tp6ja
  • Heck, D. W., Hoffmann, A., & Moshagen, M. (2018). Detecting nonadherence without loss in efficiency: A simple extension of the crosswise model. Behavior Research Methods, 50, 1895-1905. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0957-8
  • Heck, D. W., & Moshagen, M. (2018). RRreg: An R package for correlation and regression analyses of randomized response data. Journal of Statistical Software, 85(2), 1-29. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v085.i02
  • Thielmann, I., Heck, D. W., & Hilbig, B. E. (2016). Anonymity and incentives: An investigation of techniques to reduce socially desirable responding in the Trust Game. Judgment and Decision Making, 11, 527-536. http://journal.sjdm.org/16/16613/jdm16613.pdf