| Summary: | Previous research has
established that higher levels of trait Honesty-Humility (HH) are associated
with less dishonest behavior in cheating paradigms. However, only imprecise
effect size estimates of this HH-cheating link are available. Moreover,
evidence is inconclusive on whether other basic personality traits from the
HEXACO or Big Five models are associated with unethical decision making and
whether such effects have incremental validity beyond HH. We address these
issues in a highly powered reanalysis of 16 studies assessing dishonest
behavior in an incentivized, one-shot cheating paradigm ($N$ = 5,002). For this
purpose, we rely on a newly developed logistic regression approach for the
analysis of nested data in cheating paradigms. We also test theoretically
derived interactions of HH with other basic personality traits (i.e.,
Emotionality and Conscientiousness) and situational factors (i.e., the baseline
probability of observing a favorable outcome) as well as the incremental
validity of HH over demographic characteristics. The results show a medium to
large effect of HH (odds ratio = 0.53), which was independent of other
personality, situational, or demographic variables. Only one other trait (Big
Five Agreeableness) was associated with unethical decision making, although it
failed to show any incremental validity beyond HH.
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