| Summary: | The current study tested
the boundary conditions of ethical decision-making by increasing cognitive
load. This manipulation is believed to hinder deliberation, and, as we argue,
reduces the cognitive capacity needed for a self-serving bias to occur. As
telling a lie is believed to be more cognitively taxing than telling the truth,
we hypothesized that participants would be more honest under high cognitive
load than low cognitive load. 173 participants anonymously rolled a die three
times and reported their outcomes --- of which one of the rolls would be paid
out --- while either under high or low cognitive load. For the roll that
determined pay, participants under low cognitive load, but not under high
cognitive load, reported die rolls that were significantly different from a
uniform (honest) distribution. The reported outcome of this roll was also
significantly higher in the low load condition than in the high load condition,
suggesting that participants in the low load condition lied to get higher pay.
This pattern was not observed for the second and third roll where participants
knew the rolls were not going to be paid out and where therefore lying would
not serve self-interest. Results thus indicate that having limited cognitive
capacity will unveil a tendency to be honest in a situation where having more
cognitive capacity would have enabled one to serve self-interest by
lying.
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