The Impact of Placing an Honesty Pledge on the Top vs Bottom of a Form

Placing an honesty pledge at the top of a form significantly increases honesty, while placing it at the bottom leads to more cheating. The first study found that when the honesty pledge was at the top of the form, only 37% of students cheated, compared to 79% when it was at the bottom. The effect size was large and statistically significant (p<0.001). However, further analysis by data collider researchers revealed suspicious data in the study, including duplicate participant IDs and rows out of order. Removing these suspicious data points resulted in different outcomes. This suggests that the researcher may have manipulated the data to obtain a surprising result. Incentives for researchers to find surprising results and the desire for publication may contribute to such manipulation.