Filling in the missing pieces: Personality traits (un)related to dishonest behavior

Abstract

Despite notable progress in the study of dishonest behavior and in particular the identification of personality traits (most notably, Honesty-Humility) that are robust predictors of individual differences in dishonesty, prior research has also left several traits untested or yielded inconsistent or inconclusive findings for other traits. We herein provide corresponding evidence, testing the associations between dishonesty and six operationalizations of Big Five Agreeableness, the dark tetrad traits, impression management and lie scales, and self-control versus impulsivity. We relied on a large dataset (N = 1,916) across two incentivized measurements of dishonesty (separated by about 5 weeks) and tailored hierarchical modeling, and preregistered all hypotheses prior to data analysis. As expected, neither impression management and lie scales nor self-control versus impulsivity were related to dishonesty. By contrast, dark tetrad traits were consistently associated with dishonesty, though almost entirely due to their shared aversive core, the dark factor of personality. Finally, several (but not all) operationalizations of Big Five Agreeableness were associated with dishonesty, but none explained incremental variance above Honesty-Humility whereas the opposite was always the case. We discuss the implications of these findings for recent controversies about basic personality structure, the question of theoretical parsimony, and the dangers of jingle-fallacies.

Plain language summary

We test whether various personality traits are predictive of dishonesty.