Competition increases the magnitude of dishonest reporting even when controlling for reward uncertainty

Andras Molnar; Gabriele Paolacci

doi:10.1038/s41598-024-83621-y

Competition increases the magnitude of dishonest reporting even when controlling for reward uncertainty

Sci Rep. 2024 Dec 30;14(1):31980. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-83621-y.

Authors

Andras Molnar¹, Gabriele Paolacci²

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, 530 Church Street, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA. andrasm@umich.edu.
² Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, Burgemeester Oudlaan 50, 3062 PA, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Abstract

Does competition increase cheating? This question has been investigated by both psychologists and economists in the past and received conflicting answers. Notably, prior experimental work compared how people behaved under competitive and non-competitive tasks that were associated with different levels of uncertainty about the reward that people would receive. We aim to experimentally disentangle the effect of competition from the effects of uncertain rewards. We conducted an incentivized, pre-registered study featuring real-time interaction between participants (N = 765). We introduce an uncertain non-competitive incentive scheme along with the certain non-competitive scheme and the (uncertain) competitive scheme. We find that competition significantly increases the magnitude (but not the prevalence) of cheating relative to both non-competitive schemes, with the effect of competition being larger when the level of uncertainty is held constant across schemes.

Keywords: (dis)honesty; Cheating; Competition; Effort; Risk; Uncertainty.

MeSH terms

Adult
Competitive Behavior*
Deception*
Female
Humans
Male
Motivation
Reward*
Uncertainty
Young Adult