Does Resource Scarcity Increase Self-Serving Dishonesty? Most People Wrongly Believe So

Does resource scarcity increase people's inclination to engage in self-serving dishonesty? Whereas some theories suggest so, we found no evidence for this across four studies, but a fifth study revealed that most people (wrongly) believe that it does. More precisely, based on three well-powered preregistered online experiments (overall N = 4,193), complemented by two pilot studies (N = 51 and N = 49, respectively) and one manipulation check study (N = 424), we provide evidence that neither exogenously induced resource scarcity nor priming people into a scarcity mindset influences people's inclination to engage in self-serving dishonesty. Furthermore, by linking country-level poverty data to a country-level indicator of self-serving dishonesty based on a recent meta-analysis comprising 47 countries and more than 44,000 participants, we found that people living in poorer countries are no more inclined to engage in self-serving dishonesty than people living in richer countries. Finally, we found that most people-and especially men and people low in Agreeableness versus Anger-wrongly believe that people living in poorer countries are more willing to engage in self-serving dishonesty (N = 658). Overall, our investigation adds new evidence to the burgeoning literature on the link between resource scarcity (in the form of poverty) and unethical behavior (in the form of self-serving dishonesty).