Does the truth come naturally? Time pressure and low cognitive reflection promote honesty in deception games

Abstract

Many interactions require people to act quickly, and are characterized by asymmetric information. Since asymmetric information makes people tempted to misreport their private information for their own benefit, it is important to understand whether time pressure interferes with honest behavior. Previous studies suggest that time pressure increases dishonesty. However, these studies have the limitation that subjects knew beforehand that their payoff-maximizing strategy was to deceive, and thus it remains unclear whether time pressure increases dishonesty or simply increases payoff maximization. Here we report two studies aimed at filling this gap. In Study 1, subjects were given an information and were asked to report it within 5 seconds vs after 30 seconds. Crucially, participants did not know their payoff maximizing strategy before knowing the private information. We find that time pressure increases honest behavior. Moreover, we find that this effect disappears when the same economic scenario is presented as a simple choice between two allocations of money, with no lying involved, demonstrating that our results are driven by honesty, and not by a potential conflict between self-regarding and other-regarding preferences. Study 2 explores the psychological mechanisms behind this result and finds that low scores in a Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) predict honesty. Since both time pressure and low CRT scores make people more likely to rely on their automatized strategies, our results support the Truth-Default Theory, which assumes that people have internalized true-telling as their default strategies.