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

在对（非）诚实的研究中，最近有两个相对的突破，一个是对代表诚实的广泛人格特征的论证，另一个是对行为任务的发展，这使得对实际（非）诚实的结结性研究成为可能。这两个开创性的发展最近被结合起来，证实了自我报告的诚实特质确实可以预测行为（不诚实），从而有助于解释（不诚实）行为中发现的显著个体差异。然而，许多现有的经验证据仅限于一个社会背景，即德国，根据最近的跨国研究，德国恰好是平均诚实水平特别高的国家之一。问题是，与德国的样本相比，自我报告的诚实特质和不诚实行为之间的关系可能不仅在许多社会中被削弱了，而且实际上可能是相反的。这可能是因为社会诚实规范（在德国似乎相对明显）似乎会影响自我报告诚实的程度，或者因为那些自我报告诚实水平高的人实际上并没有内在的动机去诚实，但实际上是在追求社会一致性——因此，对通过自我报告衡量诚实等特征的普遍可行性的最基本假设和/或人格心理学家在“诚实”标签下测量的实质意义提出了质疑。因此，迫切需要一个跨社会异质性的测试，即关于自我报告的特质诚实与行为不诚实的跨社会数据，以评估人格与不诚实之间的联系是否以及如何取决于典型诚实程度的跨社会差异。因此，拟议的项目研究了11个不同国家/社会（澳大利亚、奥地利、巴西、加拿大、丹麦、德国、墨西哥、葡萄牙、西班牙、瑞士和美国）的自我报告的特质诚实和相关特征是否以及在多大程度上预测了实际的行为（不诚实），这也允许对仅在一个特定方面存在差异的国家进行特定的两两比较，以促进对异质性潜在驱动因素的理解。

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.