Unwilling but not unable to control: Ego depletion increases effortful dishonesty with material rewards.

Previous studies have found that ego depletion increases dishonesty. However, it remains unclear whether ego depletion makes participants unable to exert self-control or unwilling to exert self-control when it increases dishonesty. The present study aimed to clarify this. Based on the process model, ego depletion causes individuals to pay more attention to material rewards and increases the motivation to act on impulse. Therefore, it is possible that ego-depleted participants are unwilling, rather than unable, to be honest. We conducted two experiments to examine this hypothesis. Results showed that ego depletion increased material-based dishonesty even when the dishonest behavior was more complicated and effortful than was the honest behavior. However, participants were reluctant to cheat just for convenience, and ego depletion had no apparent effect on convenience-based dishonesty without any material rewards. The theoretical implications and future directions of these results are discussed.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Scandinavian Journal of Psychology

• Publication date

  2019-06-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1111/sjop.12526PMID 30785636
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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