  Many situations require people to act quickly and are characterized by
asymmetric information. Since asymmetric information makes people tempted to
misreport their private information for their own benefit, it is of primary
importance to understand whether time pressure affects honest behavior. A
theory of social heuristics (the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, SHH), predicts
that, in case of one-shot interactions, such an effect exists and it is
positive. The SHH proposes that when people have no time to evaluate all
available alternatives, they tend to rely on heuristics, choices that are
optimal in everyday, repeated interactions and that have been internalized over
time; and then, after deliberation, people shift their behavior towards the one
that is optimal in the given interaction. Thus, the SHH predicts that time
pressure increases honesty in one-shot interactions (because honesty may be
optimal in repeated interactions, while dishonesty is always optimal in the
short run). However, to the best of our knowledge, no experimental studies have
tested this prediction. Here, I report a large (N=1,013) study aimed at filling
this gap. In this study, participants were given a private information and were
asked to report it within 5 seconds vs after 30 seconds. The interaction was
one-shot, and payoffs were such that subjects had an incentive to lie. As
predicted by the SHH, I find that time pressure increases honest behavior. In
doing so, these results provide new insights on the role of time pressure on
honesty, and provide one more piece of evidence in support of the Social
Heuristics Hypothesis.
