The Psychology of Planting Evidence

Methods

Summary

We are proposing to conduct a series of experiments in which participants will be in a situation in which they will witness another participant (actually an accomplice of the experimenters) cheat in order to put themselves in position to win money. In the critical conditions of the experiments, the participants would have an easy opportunity to manipulate the cheater's materials so that the cheating would be discovered by the experimenter. We will vary several factors to see if they increase or decrease the likelihood of participants planting the evidence to implicate the cheater, including whether they learn the cheater had apparently cheated previously, whether the cheater was otherwise likeable or not, and the apparent likelihood that the cheating would be detected without the participant's manipulating the evidence.