FlashReportToo tired to tell the truth: Self-control resource depletion and dishonesty
Introduction
When given the opportunity to profit from a dishonest act, what determines whether people cheat or remain honest? Such opportunities present a motivational conflict between taking short-term, selfish gain and acting in virtuous ways that presumably bring long-term rewards that include social acceptance. Resolving such dilemmas may be one of the core functions of self-control.
Self-control is defined as the capacity to alter one’s responses, such as by overriding some impulses in order to bring behavior in line with goals and standards (Baumeister et al., 1994, Carver and Scheier, 1981). Brains evolved to serve the organisms that house them, and so amoral selfishness is normal and natural in the animal kingdom. Social life, however, requires some curtailing of selfishness for the sake of harmony and effective group functioning. Human social life (culture) features a great many rules and standards, including moral rules to which individuals must conform if they are to maintain membership in the group and the group is to function. Self-control, as the capacity to overcome selfish impulses so as to act in socially desirable ways, has therefore been called the “moral muscle” (Baumeister & Exline, 1999). Dramatic support for the importance of self-control for moral, prosocial behavior comes from evidence that low self-control may be the single most important factor in producing criminal, antisocial behavior (Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990).
If honesty depends on self-control, then the situational state of one’s capacity for self-control should determine how people respond to opportunities for cheating. Research suggests that all acts of self-control draw on a common resource that becomes depleted with use (e.g., Muraven et al., 1998, Vohs and Heatherton, 2000). Thus, following one act of self-control, people tend to perform relatively poorly on a subsequent, ostensibly unrelated self-control task (see Baumeister, Vohs, & Tice, 2007). In effect, the moral muscle loses some of its strength after exertion.
The hypothesis for the present work was that dishonest behavior should increase when resources for self-control have been depleted by prior exertion. In the present studies, self-control resources were manipulated by having some participants engage in a first task that required overriding of responses. Then they were given a second unrelated test with a monetary incentive and an opportunity to increase their pay by claiming more correct answers than they actually had. The prediction was that participants who had exerted self-control to override responses on the first task would (falsely) claim more correct answers than other participants on the second test.
Section snippets
Method
Eighty-four (40 female) undergraduates were randomly assigned among four conditions. Self-control resource depletion was manipulated using Schmeichel’s (2007) procedure: All participants were asked to write a short essay without using words that contained either the letters A and N (depletion condition) or the letters X and Z (no-depletion condition). Following this task, participants self-reported their mood on the PANAS (Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988).
Ostensibly as a separate experiment,
Experiment 2
Outside the laboratory, people can sometimes choose whether to enter, leave, or avoid situations that contain the temptation to indulge inappropriate or antisocial impulses. Knowing that depleted resources could weaken one’s resistance to temptation, people may avoid opportunities to cheat. On the other hand, diminished resources might make people less effective at such proactive self-regulation as avoiding temptation. Experiment 2 tested the effects of depletion on both whether people exposed
General discussion
The present findings link self-control to cheating. When people’s self-control resources have been taxed by a prior act of self-control, cheating increases. In Experiment 1, depleted participants claimed more answers (and hence took more money) than did non-depleted participants. In Experiment 2, depleted participants were more likely than others to expose themselves to the temptation to cheat – and they were also more likely to succumb to that temptation, thus again claiming more correct
Acknowledgments
We thank Alexis Santos and Elizabeth Mervis for their assistance with data collection and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions. We greatly appreciate the support of a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (NM), grants from National Institute of Health (1RL1AA017541) and the Templeton Foundation (RB), and the Center for Behavioral Economics at Duke University (DA).
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