When and why does observability increase honesty? The role of gossip and reputational concern

Annika S. Nieper, Bianca Beersma, Maria T. M. Dijkstra and Gerben A. Van Kleef

Judgment and Decision Making, 2025, vol. 20, -

Abstract: People frequently engage in dishonest behavior, which entails costs to society. A common advice to increase honesty is to enhance observability. However, previous research produced conflicting findings, making it unclear when and why observability increases honesty. Here we show that observability enhances honesty when observers can gossip to relevant others (i.e., to future interaction partners who can influence the gossip target’s outcome), because it increases reputational concern. In 2 incentivized and pre-registered studies, participants privately rolled a die 30 times and were informed that reporting higher numbers would lead to higher outcomes (total N = 1608; 28650 observations). We manipulated observability and gossip. Both studies revealed that gossip to relevant others decreased dishonest reporting, whereas mere observation did not. Importantly, reputational concern partly mediated the impact of gossip on dishonesty. Moreover, gossip influenced recipients’ trust in gossip targets, with messages denoting dishonesty swaying trust more than messages denoting honesty. Our findings demonstrate when and why observability promotes honesty.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:judgdm:v:20:y:2025:i::p:-_3

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Judgment and Decision Making from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().