ArticleBehavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland)2017
Failure to CAPTCHA Attention: Null Results from an Honesty Priming Experiment in Guatemala.
Article in Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland), 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Effectiveness of ex ante honesty oaths in reducing dishonesty depends on content.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Framing the Default.Experimental psychology · 2024Article
- Commitment to honesty oaths decreases dishonesty, but commitment to another individual does not affect dishonesty.Communications psychology · 2023Article
- The effect of priming on fraud: Evidence from a natural field experiment.Economic inquiry · 2022Article
- Signing at the beginning versus at the end does not decrease dishonesty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
- Nudging transparent behavioural science and policy.Behavioural public policy · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We report results from a large online randomised tax experiment in Guatemala. The trial involves short messages and choices presented to taxpayers as part of a CAPTCHA pop-up window immediately before they file a tax return, with the aim of priming honest declarations. In total our sample includes 627,242 taxpayers and 3,232,430 tax declarations made over four months. Treatments include: honesty declaration; information about public goods; information about penalties for dishonesty, questions allowing a taxpayer to choose which public good they think tax money should be spent on; or questions allowing a taxpayer to state a view on the penalty for not declaring honestly. We find no impact of any of these treatments on the average amount of tax declared. We discuss potential causes for this null effect and implications for 'online nudges' around honesty priming.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.