ArticlePersonality & social psychology bulletin2026
Seeing Through the Fog: The Ability to Resolve Ambiguity Reduces Dishonesty.
Article in Personality & social psychology bulletin, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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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
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Subtle Morality-Related Cues Promote Honest Behavior in Adolescents: Evidence from Chinese Middle School Students.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The joint effect of feedback order and reward schemes on prevalence-induced perceptual decisions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Ambiguity acts as a veil that can help conceal and justify dishonest behavior. While an individual's ability to disambiguate information in a task may help remove the veil of ambiguity and thus promote honesty, the relationship between ambiguity, ability, and dishonesty is currently unexplored. To investigate this, we employed an experimental design where participants attempted to resolve an ambiguous task and reported their performance. Results showed that ambiguity and dishonesty increase in unison. Importantly, the participants who resolved ambiguity acted less dishonestly (Study 1). In Studies 2a, 2b, and 3, we increased participants' ability by briefly training them to disambiguate the information presented in the task. The results showed that participants acted less dishonestly when their ability levels were increased. Overall, the findings indicate that dishonesty can be reduced not only by making tasks less ambiguous but also by enhancing an individual's ability to successfully resolve ambiguity.
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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.