Future Lock-in: Future Implementation Increases Selection of 'Should' Choices

Todd  Rogers; Max   Bazerman

Journal Article | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes | May 2008

Future Lock-in: Future Implementation Increases Selection of 'Should' Choices

by Todd Rogers and Max Bazerman

Abstract

People often experience tension over certain choices (e.g., they should reduce their gas consumption or increase their savings, but they do not want to). Some posit that this tension arises from the competing interests of a deliberative “should” self and an affective “want” self. We show that people are more likely to select choices that serve the should self (should-choices) when the choices will be implemented in the distant rather than the near previous future. This “future lock-in” is demonstrated in four experiments for should-choices involving donation, public policy, and self-improvement. Additionally, we show that previous future lock term-in can arise without changing the structure of a should-choice, but by just changing people's temporal focus. Finally, we provide evidence that they should self operates at a higher construal level (abstract, superordinate) than the want self, and that this difference in construal partly underlies previous future lock-in.

Keywords: Decision Choices and Conditions; Research; Behavior; Conflict of Interests;

Format: Print

20 pages

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Citation:

Rogers, Todd, and Max Bazerman. "Future Lock-in: Future Implementation Increases Selection of 'Should' Choices." Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 106, no. 1 (May 2008): 1–20.

Who should get a ventilator if there aren’t enough to go around? Research on decision making leads to three concrete guidelines that policy-makers and physicians can use to make fair choices when allocating scarce, life-saving resources. The key to making fair and ethical choices is to assure that decisions are made through an impartial process.

Article | Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Signing at the Beginning vs at the End Does Not Decrease Dishonesty

Ariella Kristal, A.V. Whillans, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely

Honest reporting is essential for society to function well. However, people frequently lie when asked to provide information, such as misrepresenting their income to save money on taxes. A landmark finding published in PNAS (Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman, 2012, “Signing at the Beginning Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-reports in Comparison to Signing at the End”) provided evidence for a simple way of encouraging honest reporting: asking people to sign a veracity statement at the beginning instead of at the end of a self-report form. Since this finding was published, various government agencies have adopted this practice. However, in this project, we failed to replicate this result. Across five conceptual replications (N = 4,559) and one highly powered, pre-registered, direct replication (N = 1,235) conducted with the authors of the original paper, we observed no effect of signing first on honest reporting. Given the policy applications of this result, it is important to update the scientific record regarding the veracity of these results.

Keywords: Morality; nudge; policy-making; replication; honesty; Moral Sensibility; Behavior; Policy;

Citation:

Kristal, Ariella, A.V. Whillans, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar, and Dan Ariely. "Signing at the Beginning vs at the End Does Not Decrease Dishonesty." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 117, no. 13 (March 31, 2020). View Details

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Future Lock-in: Future Implementation Increases Selection of 'Should' Choices

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