Much of our public life is built on an assumption of good faith – that we act honestly with one another and with the state. But self-interest and wider perceptions of corruption and trust might lead to dishonest behaviour. Leong Ching argues that we can encourage more honesty through a simple nudge – allowing people the choice to be observed. This approach focuses on transparency and has powerful implications for policy design.
The problem: Honesty, trust, and policy compliance
Are people inherently good or deceitful? The answer, it appears, depends on who you ask. Hobbes, in his grim view of human nature, wrote that life in the state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In contrast, Chinese philosopher Mencius says: “Human nature is good, just as water flows downward.” For governments today, this is not hoary philosophy but an urgent practical question.
Two global trends – the stagnation of anti-corruption efforts and a widespread erosion of trust in government – signal a growing crisis. According to the 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index, 148 out of 180 countries have either stalled or slipped behind in their fight against corruption since 2012. Meanwhile, the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that 63% of people surveyed believed their governments are intentionally misleading them, with government leaders ranked as the least trusted among establishment leaders. As democracies face mounting challenges, from climate change to economic downturns and rising inequality, rebuilding the quality of our civic life has never been more crucial.
Much of our public life today is built on an assumption of good faith – not only that we act honestly with one another, but that we do so when interacting with the state. Yet self-interest often frustrates policy compliance. Whether in the form of tax evasion, lying about one’s vaccination status, or making false declarations, people have repeatedly demonstrated a capacity for maligned behavior that undermines government efforts to promote the public good. Consider, for instance, the widespread dishonesty and fraud witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic, where billions of dollars in US government funds were lost due to false claims. The traditional methods of detection and deterrence – such as audits and penalties – proved to be costly, insufficient, or plainly ineffective.
From a policy perspective, there are urgent empirical questions: Are people inherently honest? And if not, is there a way to nudge them to behave more honestly?
Experimenting with honesty
To explore this, my colleagues and I at the National University of Singapore conducted the largest field experiment on honesty to date, with 34,543 adults participating in our online study, from nine countries across the Americas, Asia, and Europe.
Our findings reveal two intriguing insights. First, that people are indeed dishonest but not maximally so. Second, there is a simple and low-cost way to encourage honesty. We found that providing individuals with a simple option – a chance to be seen to behave honestly – increases the likelihood that they will indeed do so.
We designed three experimental conditions:
1. “Private cash” was based on the classic die-roll experiment. Participants privately rolled a die and reported the outcome, with the cash reward proportional to the reported value. The rules were simple: if you roll a 1, you do not get any money. If you roll a 6, you get $5. The incentive therefore is to report as high a number as possible. If all 34,543 participants were perfectly honest, we would expect a cumulative result of 3.5. Anything higher than this indicates a degree of dishonesty.
2. “Private lottery” was similar to the “private cash” condition, but we introduced an element of chance. We wanted to see if people were more likely to be dishonest if the chances of getting the cash reward was determined by a virtual lottery. The higher the reported value of the die roll, the higher the chance of getting a cash reward. Again, the incentive is to report a high number.
3. “Public cash” provided participants a choice to either roll a die privately or on a platform visible to the researchers. In this group, they could choose whether to be observed or not.
Before the experiment, I had expected that most people would be dishonest, and that most would not choose to be monitored. I also hypothesized that people who rolled the dice under the “private lottery” condition would be the most dishonest, because I had expected “luck” to generate some moral distance.
People are partially dishonest, but want to be kept on the straight and narrow
As it turned out, I was right only in the first suspicion – most people were dishonest. When rolling entirely in private, there was significant over-reporting (from scores of 3.76 in China to 4.43 in Mexico). Even as people were dishonest, however, most were not “maximally so” – that is, instead of thinking “in for a penny, in for a pound” and going all the way to declare 6 when they rolled a 1, most people were only partially dishonest (or, perhaps as they might tell themselves, partially honest). The most surprising result came from the third condition – when offered a choice, 85% of subjects opted to be observed, and as a result, were either completely honest or very slightly dishonest; in this group, we observed zero or minimum over-reporting (with average scores of 3.46 in Germany, to 3.61 in Indonesia).
Figure 1: The average score of the die-roll reported across experimental groups and country
Source: Ho et al, 2025
These findings suggest that most people would prefer to act honestly when given the opportunity – not because they face coercion, punishment, or the prospect of loss, but because they were given a simple nudge – that there was a chance they could be perceived as honest in their social behavior. Providing individuals with the option to be observed, therefore, offers a way to balance effective governance with respect for individual autonomy.
What does this mean for policy?
This approach holds significant promise for addressing the challenges that governments face today in ensuring compliance with public policies, particularly those that rely on individual behavior, such as health regulations, environmental policies, and tax laws. The concept of encouraging honesty through transparency shifts the focus from punitive control. By allowing individuals to opt in and be seen as honest, we may not only improve policy compliance but also foster a culture of integrity and accountability.
Such an approach resonates with the concept of nudge plus, introduced by Peter John and Gerry Stoker in 2019, which builds on traditional nudges by incorporating elements of self-awareness and reflection into their design. While traditional nudges rely on fast, automatic, system-1 decision-making processes, nudge plus encourages more deliberate and informed actions. Examples include dual self-commitments, where individuals combine private contracts with public accountability, and GPS devices with built-in AI prompts that promote reflection during use.
Our research suggests that we can engage the better angels of our nature, if we design policies that allow people not just to behave honestly, but to be seen doing so. Perhaps, then, rather than Hobbes or Mencius, the voice that governments (and behavioural economists) would find most useful is Confucius who believed that “by nature, men are nearly alike; in practice, they grow to be wide apart”. It matters not whether individuals are born good or evil, but that they can be shaped – for better or worse – by their environment.
Read the full study here.
Leong Ching is an economist studying behavioural public policy. She is Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy and Vice Provost (Student Life) at the National University of Singapore.