Committed Dishonesty: A Systematic Meta-Analysis of the Effect of Social Commitment on Dishonest Behavior

People feel committed to other individuals, groups, or organizations in many contexts in everyday life. Such social commitment can have many positive outcomes, related to job satisfaction or relationship longevity, but might there also be detrimental effects to feeling committed? Recent high-profile cases of fraud or corruption in companies such as Enron or Volkswagen are likely based to some degree on strong commitment to the organization or co-workers. While social commitment might increase dishonest behavior, there is little systematic cumulative knowledge about when and how this may occur. In the present project, we reviewed 20,988 articles, while focusing on studies experimentally manipulating social commitment and measuring dishonest behavior. We retained 344 effect sizes from 110 articles featuring a total of 63,550 participants across 25 countries. We found no evidence that social commitment increases or reduces dishonest behavior in general, but we did find evidence that the effect depended strongly on the target of the commitment. Feeling commitment to other individuals or groups reduced honest behavior (g = -.17 [-.25, -.10]), while feeling commitment to social norms via honesty oaths or pledges increased honest behavior (g = .24 [.16, .32]). The analysis identified several moderating variables and found evidence for some degree of publication bias across effects. Our findings highlight the diverging effects of different forms of social commitment on dishonest behavior, and suggest a combination of the different forms of commitment as a possible means to combat corruption and dishonest behavior in the organizational context.