Behavioral field evidence on psychological and social factors in dishonesty and misconduct

• We review behavioral field evidence on dishonesty from social and behavioral sciences.
• We explain value of complementing lab research with behavioral field evidence.
• We review methods of archival analysis, natural experiments, and randomized natural field experiments.
• We clarify challenges of causality and alternative explanations unique to field data.

We review recent behavioral field evidence on dishonesty and other unethical behaviors from psychology and related fields. We specifically focus on individual-level studies that use explicitly behavioral data in natural settings, covering research topics relevant to psychology from across disciplines. Our review shows both the paucity and potential of behavioral field evidence on the psychology of dishonesty — although such research can provide actionable and realistic conclusions, it presents a host of practical and identification-related challenges that have limited its use. We explain the major methodological approaches, and discuss the multiple identification challenges for researchers using archival and other non-experimental data.