Statement:

The data necessary to produce all published results are publicly availalbe here: https://osf.io/3javq/.

For all six studies in the paper data collection was performed by Ariella Kristal, who has the complete raw data for the paper. The data for the final Study 6 (direct replication of Study 1 from retracted PNAS paper Shu et al., 2012 but without control condition) was collected at three locations: Harvard University, Boston University (overseen together by Ariella Kristal and Nina Mazar), and University of Chicago Center for Decision Research (CDR) lab.

To whom correspondance about this paper may be additionally addressed: Ariella Kristal at ask2304@columbia.edu.

This statement above has been read and approved by the following authors: Dan Ariely, Max Bazerman, Ariella S. Kristal, Nina Mazar, Lisa Shu, and Ashley Whillans.

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Note 1: By December 2021 we notified PNAS about some reporting errors and submitted a correction request; we also informed PNAS about the change in corresponding author (from FG to ASK). The corrections are detailed in the file "PNAS 2020 - Minor Corrections.pdf" on OSF (see link above). 

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Note 2: The studies in Kristal et al. (2020) found no significant difference between people’s self-reports in conditions where people were asked to sign an honesty certification after (standard procedure such as e.g., at the end of a tax form) vs. before self-reporting. This is largely in line with a set of field experiments that compared people’s self-reports in conditions where people were asked to sign an honesty certification after self-reporting (standard procedure such as e.g., at the end of a tax form) vs. conditions were people were asked to sign two times: before and after self-reporting (e.g., as part of a CAPTCHA pop-up window before proceeding to a tax form and at the end of the tax form, see Kettle et al., 2020; in an insurance context: Martuza et al., 2022). 

However, it is noteworthy that a number of studies exist that have found a significant difference between people’s self-reports in conditions where people did not encounter any honesty certification (i.e. none) vs. where people were asked to sign an honesty certification before self-reporting. For example, forward-looking honesty oaths/pledges (i.e. sign-before honesty certifications) reduced cheating/resulted in more accurate self-reporting in these recently published papers: Beck et al., 2018; Jacquemet et al., 2019; Heinicke et al., 2019; Pe'er & Feldman, 2021 and in this mansucript currently under peer review: Pe’er et al. (2023) BUT increased cheating in Cagala et al., 2021. Finally, there are two related megastudies on the way, one aiming to test the effectiveness of different types of forward-looking honesty oaths/pledges (i.e. sign-before honesty certifications) in comparison to no honesty certification, see Zickfeld et al. (2024) and one testing the effectivenss of various types of interventions (including forward-looking oath/pledges, moral reminders, rewards, etc.) to reduce workplace deviance (in comparison to no intervention; Scigala et al., 2023). 

Future research may want to systematically examine why honesty certification studies testing

• before locations vs. none have found differences, while studies testing
• before vs. after and before+after vs. after locations have not found differences.

Avenues worthwhile exploring may be differences in “before”, “after”, and "none" operationalizations, the texts of the various honesty certifications and ways in which participants are asked to certify, the types of performance/cheating tasks, baseline levels of misreporting/misbehavior, what cheating/misbehaving entailed doing, etc.  

References:

Beck, T. Bühren, C. Frank, B. & Khachatryan, E. (2018). Can Honesty Oaths, Peer Interaction, or Monitoring Mitigate Lying?, Journal of Business Ethics, 1-18.

Cagala, T., Glogowsky, U., & Rincke, J. (2021). Detecting and preventing cheating in exams: Evidence from a field experiment. Journal of Human Resources, published online before print, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3368/jhr.0620-10947R1.

Heinicke, F., Rosenkranz, S., & Weitzel, U. (2019). The effect of pledges on the distribution of lying behavior: An online experiment. Journal of Economic Psychology, 73, 136-151.

Jacquemet, N., Luchini, S., Rosaz, J. & Shogren, J.F. (2019). Truth telling under oath. Management Science, 65(1), 426-438.

Kettle, S., Hernandez, M., Sanders, M., Hauser, O., Ruda, S. (2017). Failure to CAPTCHA attention: Null results from an honesty priming experiment in Guatemala. Behavioral Sciences, 7(2), 28.

Martuza, J.B., Skard, S.R., Lovlie, L., Thorbjornsen, H. (2022). Do honesty-nudges really work? A large-scale field experiment in an insurance context. Journal of Consumer Behavior, 21, 927-951.

Pe’er, E., & Feldman, Y. (2021). Honesty pledges for the behaviorally-based regulation of dishonesty. Journal of European Public Policy, 28(5), 761-781.

Pe'er, Eyal, Mazar, N., Feldman, Y., & Ariely, D. (2023). Honesty Pledges: The Effects of Involvement and Identification Over Time. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4372925.

Scigala, K., & colleauges. (2023). A megastudy on interventions reducing workplace deviance. Work in progress.

Zickfeld, J., Scigala, K., Elbaek, C. T., Michael, J., Tønnesen, M. T., Levy, G., … Mitkidis, P. (2024, March 4). I Solemnly Swear I’m Up To Good: A Megastudy Investigating the Effectiveness of Honesty Oaths on Curbing Dishonesty. Retrieved from osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/hctxe