Competing Under Oath: Can Honesty Pledges Reduce Cheating in Competitive Environments?

People frequently compete with one another for awards, benefits, contracts, positions, or roles. One of the regulatory challenges in these contexts lies in preventing people from making dishonest claims to win such competitions. Honesty pledges, asking people to commit to ethical behavior ex ante, have been found to reduce cheating under non-competitive settings (when rewards were given based on individual reports only). However, as people behave differently under competitive settings, it is unclear whether honesty pledges could be effective and recommended in such situations as well. In four experiments, we apply honesty pledges to competitive and non-competitive settings, finding that pledges remain effective in reducing cheating behavior under competitive contexts (Studies 1–4). Moreover, this effect is not crowded out if a sanction (fine) is added to the honesty pledge (Study 2). Honesty pledges are also effective among people who tend to cheat more, due to low or overestimated task-related ability (Study 2) or due to high competitiveness (Study 3). Additionally, people's estimations regarding others' cheating behavior explain why pledges accompanied by descriptive honesty norms affect cheating behavior (Study 3). Lastly, even in high-stakes competitive environments that demonstrably increased dishonesty, honesty pledges remained effective in reducing dishonesty (Study 4). These findings demonstrate that honesty pledges can serve as effective non-coercive regulatory instruments to reduce dishonesty in competitive environments, offering advantages over traditional enforcement mechanisms while remaining effective even among individuals most prone to cheating and under high-stakes conditions, with important implications for organizational policy design and regulatory approaches.