Honesty beyond borders? A cross-national study of the interplay between personality and societal norms

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Two relatively recent breakthroughs in the study of (dis)honesty have been the demonstration of a broad personality trait representing honesty and the development of behavioral tasks that allow for the conclusive study of actual (dis)honesty. These two seminal developments were recently combined, corroborating that self-reported trait honesty is indeed predictive of behavioral (dis)honesty and thus serves to explain the notable individual differences found in (dis)honest behavior. However, much of the available empirical evidence is constrained to one single societal context, Germany, which happens to be among the countries with a particularly high average level of honesty according to recent cross-national studies. Problematically, the relationship between self-reported trait honesty and behavioral dishonesty may not only be reduced in potentially many societies as compared to German samples – it may actually reverse. This may occur both because societal honesty norms (which appear to be relatively pronounced in Germany) plausibly influence the extent to which self-reports on honesty are actually honest and/or because those with high self-reported honesty levels are not actually intrinsically motivated to be honest, but actually striving for social conformity – thus calling into question the most fundamental assumptions about the general viability of measuring a trait such as honesty through self-reports and/or the substantive meaning of what personality psychologists are measuring under the label "honesty". Thus, a test of cross-societal heterogeneity is urgently needed, i.e. cross-societal data relating self-reported trait honesty to behavioral dishonesty to assess whether and how the link between personality and dishonesty depends on the cross-societal variation in the typical extent of honesty. The proposed project thus studies whether and how well self-reported trait honesty and related traits predict actual behavioral (dis)honesty across 11 different countries/societies (Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Mexico, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and the USA) which also allows for specific pair-wise comparisons of countries differing only in one specific aspect to foster an understanding of the potential drivers of heterogeneity.