Although people think of themselves as honest – more honest than others even (Bazerman & Tenbrunsel, 2011) – most people occasionally cheat. According to self-concept maintenance theory (Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008), when people are faced with a choice between honesty and dishonesty, they cheat to the extent to which they can justify their misbehavior (Shalvi, Dana, Handgraaf, & De Dreu, 2011). According to bounded ethicality theory (Chugh, Bazerman, & Banaji, 2005), dishonesty results from “ethical blind spots.” Following Bazerman and Tenbrunsel (2011), we define ethical blind spots as situations in which people pay little (or no) attention to ethical considerations when doing so is against their self-interest (for a similar definition, see Bazerman, 2014; Pittarello, Leib, Gordon-Hecker, & Shalvi, 2015). For instance, imagine a CEO conflicted between recalling a malfunctioning product that can hurt people (and thus losing money) or ignoring this issue and leaving the product on the market (and thus earning money). In this situation, the financial incentive to keep the product on the market can avoid the CEO from paying attention to the ethical issue, in turn increasing dishonesty. At times, blind spots are unintentional (e.g., when people are unaware of a conflict of interest), while at other times they represent an intentional justification strategy, such as when people avoid attending to information that will prevent them from obtaining undeserved gains (see Jacobsen, Fosgaard, & Pascual-Ezama, 2018; Pittarello, Motro, Rubaltelli, & Pluchino, 2016).

Recent work has used eye tracking to show that blind spots emerge more often in tempting and ambiguous situations, where ambiguity serves as a justification to do wrong; this is in line with the notion of self-concept maintenance (i.e., it allows people to maintain a positive self-image) as well as bounded ethicality. For instance, Pittarello et al. (2015) asked participants to report the outcome of a die roll (one of six dice) appearing closest to a fixation cross to determine their pay, with higher rolls corresponding to higher payoffs. Ambiguity was manipulated by displaying the fixation cross on the midpoint of either the right or left side of the die. At times, the die second closest to the fixation cross was higher (and thus more profitable) than the target die. In these ambiguous settings, participants exhibited blind spots: They looked more at the higher die, even if it was not the target.

Our research question is to understand when, during the decision process, blind spots arise. We hypothesize that they occur rapidly, and base our prediction on research on behavioral ethics that employs a dual-process perspective (Evans, 2008; Haidt, 2007; Kahneman, 2011; Strack & Deutsch, 2004); according to research, in tempting situations, people’s first reaction is to serve their self-interest. As a case in point, Shalvi et al. (2012, 2013) found that people cheated more under time pressure than when given ample time. Similarly, Mead et al. (2009) and Gino et al. (2011) found that people cheat more when they lack self-control and when their cognitive capacities are reduced. Finally, work on neuroscience showed that areas of the brains associated with self-control are activated when people avoid lying (Greene & Paxton, 2009). To sum, this work shows that in tempting situations, people’s initial motivation is to lie.

While motivation affects cheating, in tempting situations it also makes people perceive and process information in a self-serving way (Balcetis & Dunning, 2006). This suggests that when cheating pays off and justifications are available, people should quickly gaze at tempting (yet dishonest) information that would allow them to earn undeserved money while in turn paying little attention to honest (but less profitable information). Thus, we predict that when facing the opportunity to cheat, blind spots manifest quickly during the decision process.

Eye tracking is a powerful tool to detect when ethical blind spots arise, because fast eye movements are largely beyond voluntary control, and reflect involuntary processes such as previous rewards (we tend to first look at things that were previously rewarded, regardless of whether they will be rewarded again) and visual saliency (we tend to first look at things that have sharp edges, high luminance contrast, etc.) (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012; Theeuwes, Kramer, Hahn, & Irwin, 1998).

Hochman and colleagues (2016) tested whether people immediately look at profitable, yet “dishonest,” options by asking participants to report whether there were more dots on either the left or right side of a square. In the experimental trials, participants received more money if they reported one side of the square (e.g., always the left side) irrespective of the accuracy of the response. This provided them with an opportunity to cheat. By tracking eye movements, the authors found that when participants cheated, they tended to look immediately at the highly rewarded half, rather than the half that actually contained more dots. This finding is important and provides initial support for the rapid emergence of blind spots. However, in this experiment, the rewarded side was kept constant throughout blocks of many trials; therefore, the results cannot tell us whether the eye movements toward the highly rewarded side indeed reflected a fast tendency to cheat, or rather a strategy that built up over time.

Overall, these findings show that profitable (but morally undesirable) information attracts attention at the expense of less profitable (but morally desirable) information, thus shaping ethical blind spots. Therefore, interventions that redirect people’s attention back toward morally desirable information should reduce ethical blind spots and promote honesty. This is in line with the REVISE framework put forth by Ayal et al. (2015). According to this model, providing subtle cues that increase the saliency of ethical criteria can decrease dishonesty in tempting and ambiguous situations. To be effective, these cues should be timely, which means that they should be presented right before people have the opportunity to cheat. Building on this framework, we reasoned that one possible intervention involves visual saliency: The extent to which visual stimuli stand out from the environment, for example because they are high in contrast or contain sharp edges (Itti, Koch, & Niebur, 1998). Salient stimuli capture people’s attention (Yantis & Jonides, 1984), and in real-life settings tend to be preferred over less salient stimuli (Orquin, Scholderer, & Jeppesen, 2012).

In two experiments (one pre-registered) we asked participants to report a Target Digit (among multiple digits) that was indicated by a Cue (Fig. 1). The cue was a fuzzy and jittery line-segment that was slightly biased towards another digit, which we call the Second-Cued Digit. Participants were either paid for accurately reporting the Target Digit (Accuracy condition) or were paid based on the value of the reported digit, regardless of accuracy, such that reporting a higher digit yielded a higher payoff (Report condition). On some trials, the Second-Cued Digit was higher than the Target Digit. Here, participants in the Report condition could make self-serving (but not self-hurting) mistakes to increase their payoff. In other words, dishonesty would manifest itself as a tendency to report the Target Digit less often (and the Second-Cued Digit more often) when it is lower than the Second-Cued Digit, compared to when it is higher than the Second-Cued Digit.

Fig. 1 (a) A schematic representation of the experimental procedure for Experiments 1 and 2. In this example, the cue points halfway between the “2” and the “6,” which we refer to as 50% ambiguity. (b) In Experiment 2, the visual saliency of the Target Digit was either increased or decreased relative to that of the Second-Cued digit. In this example, the saliency of the Target Digit (“2”) is increased relative to the saliency of the Second-Cued Digit (“7”). The saliency map was generated with the Python Saliency Map library (https://github.com/mayoYamasaki/saliency-map) Full size image

Experiment 1 tested whether, when making self-serving mistakes, participants’ initial eye movements are directed toward the tempting digit even when this is the dishonest option; if so, this would suggest that participants’ reports are caused by the rapid emergence of blind spots.

Experiment 2 tested whether increasing the visual saliency of the Target Digit would reduce self-serving mistakes. Crucially, the digit stimuli were large enough to be discriminated in peripheral vision; therefore, participants could directly look at the digit that attracted attention most, without first needing to scan the display with a series of eye movements.