The Motivational Core of Honesty

The aim of this preregistered study was to empirically identify a comprehensive set of goals related to honesty-humility and to dishonesty, and specifically to their facets: (im)modesty, greed (avoidance), (un)fairness, (in)sincerity. We asked 250 participants to write down the goals that they ascribed to 48 adjectives identified in a previous study, which describe behaviors associated with different aspects of honesty, plus control adjectives. The resulting textual corpus was analyzed relying on a combination of natural language processing, independent-rater judgment, network analysis, and clustering techniques developed in previous studies. As a result, we obtained classes grouping the goals related to both positive and negative poles of honesty. We then quantified the motivational overlap between different aspects of honesty. Knowledge of the motivational bases of honesty and dishonesty is crucial for understanding the processes underlying these traits, as well as for the further developing scales measuring them.