Darkness promotes dishonesty in a coin toss task: A pre-registered conceptual replication of Experiment 1 of Zhong, Bohns, and Gino (2010)

Abstract

An earlier study suggested that individuals tend to be more dishonest in darker environments, this phenomenon was attributed to an increase in participants’ perceived anonymity. However, instead of using quantifiable measurements, the original experiment depended on the experimenter’s subjective observation to construct different brightness conditions, which led to a less precise understanding of the phenomenon. Additionally, the task used in the original experiment has recently been criticized as being unsuitable for dishonesty-detection studies. This study addressed these concerns to retest the effect of brightness on dishonest behavior. This study employed lux as a unit to accurately control the brightness within the experiment room. Moreover, the coin toss task which is frequently employed in dishonesty-detection experiments, was utilized instead of the task in the original experiment. The findings revealed that despite altering the content of the task, dishonesty increased in the dark condition. Contrary to the findings in the original experiment, however, the results did not substantiate that perceived anonymity was the driving factor of the effect of brightness on dishonesty. This discrepancy suggests that further empirical considerations are warranted to unravel the underlying mechanisms.