Lying under self-control depletion and time pressure

Dealing with temptations requires self-control. If lying for money constitutes a temptation, restricting
people’s self-control resources would enhance unethical behavior. We argue that the effect of the self-control
on lying depends on two things: 1) easiness to grasp the opportunity to lie, and 2) the amount of
time available to decide. In an incentivized online experiment, we manipulate participants’ self-control
resources through an ego depletion task and allow them to misreport the outcome of a dice-roll with
and without time pressure. We find evidence that ego depletion increases the fraction of truth-tellers
under time pressure. Our findings suggest that when discovering the opportunities to lie is not trivial
and people are constrained with the time, self-control depletion enhances people’s ethical behavior