In three experiments, we examined the cognitive underpinnings of self-serving dishonesty by manipulating cognitive load under different incentive structures. Participants could increase a financial bonus by misreporting outcomes of private die rolls without any risk of detection. At the same time, they had to remember letter strings of varying length. If honesty is the automatic response tendency and dishonesty is cognitively demanding, lying behavior should be less evident under high cognitive load. This hypothesis was supported by the outcome of two out of three experiments. We further manipulated whether all trials or only one random trial determined payoff to modulate reward adaptation over time (Experiment 2) and whether payoff was framed as a financial gain or loss (Experiment 3). The payoff scheme of one random or all trials did not affect lying behavior and, discordant to earlier research, facing losses instead of gains did not increase lying behavior. Finally, cognitive load and incentive frame interacted significantly, but contrary to our assumption gains increased lying under low cognitive load. While the impact of cognitive load on dishonesty appears to be comparably robust, motivational influences seem to be more elusive than commonly assumed in current theorizing.

在三个实验中，我们通过操纵不同激励结构下的认知负荷来检验自利不诚实的认知基础。参与者可以通过在没有任何被发现风险的情况下错误报告私人掷骰子的结果来增加经济红利。同时，他们必须记住不同长度的字母串。如果诚实是自动反应倾向，而不诚实是认知要求，那么说谎行为在高认知负荷下应该不太明显。三分之二的实验结果支持了这一假设。我们进一步操纵了是所有试验还是只有一个随机试验确定收益以随着时间的推移调节奖励适应（实验 2）以及收益是否被视为经济收益或损失（实验 3）。一项随机试验或所有试验的回报方案不会影响撒谎行为，而且与早期研究不一致的是，面对损失而不是收益不会增加撒谎行为。最后，认知负荷和激励框架显着相互作用，但与我们的假设相反，认知负荷较低的情况下收益会增加。虽然认知负荷对不诚实的影响似乎相对强大，但动机影响似乎比当前理论中普遍假设的更难以捉摸。