Signals of Virtue and When they Backfire: How Honesty Badges Provide Cover for Dishonesty

Abstract

Organizations have begun using publicly-visible badges to promote ethical behaviors, such as workers’ contributions to colleagues’ projects and scientists’ engagement in transparent research practices. Across six experimental online studies, we evaluate whether badges incentivize ethical behavior as proposed (N = 2047). Our results indicate that, in some instances, badges’ signaling value undermines their ability to promote honesty. When it is possible to earn an honesty badge while still engaging in dishonest behavior, badges backfire by providing cover to dishonest individuals. Under “opaque badges,” workers will do only what is needed to earn a badge and behave more dishonestly than they would when no badge is available. Moreover, opaque badges make workers appear more honest to observers, leading them to down-weight worker behavior that would otherwise arouse suspicion. We show that removing badges’ ability to provide cover–by clarifying what workers did to earn them–can attenuate these effects.

Keywords: Honesty, Signaling, Badges, Open Science