Can honesty oaths help reduce dishonest behaviors like tax evasion? A new megastudy involving over 21,500 participants in the UK and US explored this question. Researchers tested 21 different honesty oaths and found that 10 significantly increased tax compliance, reducing evasion by 4.5 to 8.5 percentage points. The most effective oaths nearly cut tax evasion in half! Interestingly, experts and laypeople struggled to predict the best-performing interventions, though experts fared better. The study shows that while honesty oaths can curb dishonesty, their effectiveness depends on the specific content. These insights could guide the design of impactful interventions to reduce dishonest behaviors. #BehavioralScience #TaxCompliance #Research #Dishonesty #BehavioralInterventions
🚨 New Research Alert Thrilled to share our latest paper, now published in Nature Human Behaviour (Nature Portfolio)! 🔍 How can we reduce dishonest behavior in a tax evasion game? One popular solution: honesty oaths. But do they all work the same? 🤔 To find out, we conducted a #megastudy testing 21 different honesty oaths on 20,000+ participants. Results: Both experts and laypeople struggled to predict which oaths worked best. The most effective oath? It almost cut tax evasion in half by focusing on specific actions: "I hereby declare that I will provide honest information when reporting my final income from the sorting task." Full paper here👉 https://lnkd.in/dXGcTc2H The project was led brilliantly by Janis Zickfeld, alongside an amazing team of many collaborators. Thank you all! #BehavioralScience #HonestyOaths #TaxEvasion #MegaStudy #ScienceInAction #NatureHumanBehaviour #ResearchCollaboration w/ Karolina Ścigała, Christian T. Elbæk, John Michael, Mathilde Hedegaard Tønnesen, Gabriel Levy, Shahar Ayal, Isabel Thielmann, Laila Nockur, Eyal Pe'er, Rachel Barkan, Simen Bø, Stepan Bahnik, Daniele Nosenzo, Ralph Hertwig, Nina Mažar (Mazar), Alexa Weiss, Ann-Kathrin Koessler-Cortes, Ronit Montal Rosenberg, Sebastian Hafenbrädl, Yngwie Asbjorn Nielsen, Patricia Kanngiesser, Simon Schindler, Philipp Gerlach, Valerio Capraro, Nicolas Jacquemet, Marek Vranka, Dan Ariely, Jareef Bin Martuza, Yuval Feldman, Michal Bialek, Jan K. Woike, Zoe Rahwan, Alicia Seidl, Eileen Chou, Dr. Agne Kajackaite, Simeon Schudy, Ulrich Glogowsky, Anna Czarna, Stefan Pfattheicher, Panagiotis Mitkidis