INSPANNING, WAARDE EN EERLIJKHEID

Dishonesty has a major impact on society. In 2006 in the USA companies and individuals that were not honest about their income, committed fraud for over $376 billion. This raises the question what governments and companies can do to minimize this dishonesty. The experiment of the current study, based on the Self-Concept Maintenance Theory, utilized effort to stimulate honest behavior of participants. Preliminary studies have focused on saliency of the social norms to stimulate honest behavior. In current experiment participants could be dishonest to get more tokens worth € 1 each. The main question of this experiment was whether participants would be more honest if they had to put effort into making such a token. Each token a participant owned was worth €1. The participants were offered the opportunity to be dishonest and take more tokens and therefore more money than they had earned. The experiment showed no significant effects. Limitations of the experimental design were most likely the cause of the absence of a significant effect. The biggest limitation is probably that the participants were not much interested in the money but helping in the researcher.