ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
The moral barrier effect: Real and imagined barriers can reduce cheating.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 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.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed, 32 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Permission Paradox: Condoning Deception Can Promote Honesty in Young Children.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Online Academic Cheating in Young Children and its Prevention.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- The Influence of Different Types of Moral Stories on Honest Behaviour in Children.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Trusting young children to help causes them to cheat less.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- Moral Judgment and Cheating: Evidence of A Knowledge-Behavior Link in Early Childhood.Child developmentArticle
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors at 3 institutions in 3 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
This research presents a nudge-based approach to promoting honest behavior. Specifically, we introduce the moral barrier hypothesis, which posits that moral violations can be inhibited by the introduction of spatial boundaries, including ones that do not physically impede the act of transgressing. We found that, as compared to a no barrier condition, children cheated significantly less often when a barrier was strategically placed to divide the space where children were seated from a place that was associated with cheating. This effect was seen both when the barrier took a physical form and when it was purely symbolic. However, the mere presence of a barrier did not reduce cheating: if it failed to separate children from a space that was associated with cheating, children cheated as much as when there was no barrier at all. Taken together, these findings support the moral barrier hypothesis and show that even seemingly unremarkable features of children's environments can nudge them to act honestly.
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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.