Review
DENIAL: A conceptual framework to improve honesty nudges

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Highlights

  • Behavioral ethics scholars have struggled to identify strategies to limit dishonesty.

  • I introduce DENIAL, a conceptual framework that prioritizes the accounts people use to justify their dishonesty.

  • People invoke the malevolence of the target, the coerciveness of the environment, the absence of harm, and other allegiances.

  • Future strategies to mitigate dishonesty may benefit by addressing these four justifications more directly.

  • Future laboratory investigations should specify the target, harm, and social implications of dishonesty.

Abstract

Strategies to mitigate dishonesty have met with limited success, leading behavioral ethics scholars to call for a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying dishonesty. In this article, I introduce a conceptual framework, DENIAL, that identifies four fundamental mechanisms, or justifications, which provide people a rationale to consider themselves as ethical while acting unethically. I derive these justifications from a review of scholarship within cognate fields, drawing on Moral Disengagement Theory and Neutralization Theory. I identify the victim (they Deserve it), the situation (I blame my Environment), the harm (I cause No Injury), and the social relationship (I have other ALlegiances) as fundamental justifications for dishonesty. I discuss how future mitigation strategies might harness these justifications to improve their efficacy.

Introduction

Policy makers, organizations, and governments continue to seek out better strategies to combat dishonesty and limit its effects. Behavioral ethics scholars have invested significant resources to identify such strategies, conducting hundreds of investigations designed to advance our understanding of ethical decision making. As they have recently emphasized, a major purpose of these investigations is to develop honesty nudges, practical light-touch strategies to mitigate dishonesty [1,2]. Despite these efforts, scholars have struggled to provide replicable honesty nudges, and they have called for a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms that foster misconduct [3∗, 4, 5, 6∗].

Behavioral ethics scholarship has ranged widely in deploying honesty nudges. Its experimental approach has allowed scholars to causally test many different interventions to curb behaviors such as tax evasion, fare evasion, and insurance fraud on a large scale [7, 8, 9, 10∗]. The models of ethical decision making that inform many of these interventions, such as the self-concept maintenance model [11], recognize that people use justifications to explain away dishonest conduct. They do not, however, provide a theoretical framework for prioritizing which justifications people spontaneously invoke. This suggests a strategy for improving honesty nudges: first, identify the most important justifications people use when they engage in dishonesty; then, devise interventions that make those justifications less available.

Researchers in cognate fields have not only distinguished different justifications; they have also prioritized them. Neutralization Theory [12] offers one such schema, Moral Disengagement Theory [13,14] another. These literatures provide compelling evidence that offenders across disparate domains return to a small set of justifications to rationalize misconduct. Although experimental work in behavioral ethics does not exploit these insights, it does provide evidence that supports them. The two theories, together with experimental evidence in behavioral ethics, point to a set of four core justifications that are strong candidates for future honesty nudge interventions.

In this article, I introduce a conceptual framework called DENIAL that identifies these four justifications. When seeking out justifications people consider: 1) the culpability of the victim (they Deserve it), 2) the coerciveness of the situation (I blame my Environment), 3) the potential consequences of their misconduct (I cause No Injury), and 4) the needs of their in-group (I have other ALlegiances). These accounts encapsulate the fundamental justifications that allow people to act unethically while believing they are ethical. In what follows, I review the limitations of existing honesty nudges and how Neutralization Theory and Moral Disengagement Theory can address these limitations. I then outline the empirical evidence supporting DENIAL as a path forward for the theoretical development of future honesty nudges.

Section snippets

Honesty nudges

Many behavioral ethics investigations rely on the concept of justification [e.g., 11,15,16]. They assert that individuals uphold moral standards for themselves. When they consider violating those standards, they resolve their arousal, or cognitive dissonance [17], by providing justifications. Justifications can both precede and follow dishonesty [16,18,19]. People seek out ways to justify potential misconduct as well as use justifications to rationalize past misconduct. Justifications are the

DENIAL

To develop a core set of justifications, I draw on Neutralization Theory and Moral Disengagement Theory. Introduced in 1957, Neutralization Theory has garnered considerable attention from researchers in sociology and criminology [34]. The theory presents five techniques that individuals use to justify, or neutralize, their misconduct: They deny injury, deny the victim, deny responsibility, appeal to higher loyalties, and condemn their condemners [12]. Often relying on qualitative methods,

Conclusion

The ineffectiveness of extant honesty nudges has left behavioral ethics scholars calling for a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms of dishonesty. Research in cognate fields may prove helpful. Neutralization Theory and Moral Disengagement Theory provide an understanding that emphasizes justifications. In this article, I have synthesized insights from these two theories and joined it to experimental evidence in behavioral ethics to identify DENIAL, a set of core justifications

Funding source

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Conflict of interest statement

Nothing declared.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Eric Van Epps and Maurice Schweitzer for their thoughtful feedback on the ideas presented in this manuscript.

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