Signing at the Beginning Versus at the End Does Not Decrease Dishonesty

In 2012, five of the current authors published a paper in PNAS showing that people are more honest when they are asked to sign a veracity statement at the beginning instead of at the end of a tax or insurance audit form. In a recent investigation, across five related experiments we failed to find an effect of signing at the beginning on dishonesty. Following up on these studies, we conducted one preregistered, high-powered direct replication of experiment 1 of the PNAS paper, in which we failed to replicate the original result. The current paper updates the scientific record by showing that signing at the beginning is unlikely to be a simple solution for increasing honest reporting.