1. Abstract
The Honesty in Everyday Behaviour (HONBEH) scale is a psychometric instrument designed to evaluate individual moral tolerances and cognitive evaluations regarding common ethical breaches, rule-breaking, and consumer opportunism. Derived from the broader traditions of the World Values Survey and specifically adapting 13 items from the Revised Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale (MDBS; Harding & Phillips, 1986; Katz et al., 1994), HONBEH was formalized in the context of consumer ethics and service interactions by Jochen Wirtz and Doreen Kum (2004). The primary objective of the instrument is to capture the psychological threshold across which individuals view everyday dishonest conduct—such as minor tax evasion, claiming unearned benefits, public transport fare evasion, or exploiting service guarantees—as either inherently unacceptable or conditionally justifiable.
Structured across 13 core behavioral scenarios, the instrument captures two major underlying dimensions of everyday dishonesty: active illicit gains (such as committing deliberate fraud or cheating on service recovery guarantees) and passive or opportunistic gains (such as keeping money found in public spaces or failing to report billing errors in one's favor). Responses are typically recorded on a 10-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 ("never justifiable") to 10 ("always justifiable"), or alternatively on a 7-point continuum depending on the research administration context. Psychometric investigations indicate excellent internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha coefficients typically exceeding α = .80, strong test-retest reliability, and robust construct validity demonstrated through its negative association with general integrity and positive association with moral disengagement, consumer opportunism, and fraudulent behavior. The scale remains a foundational tool in consumer psychology, behavioral ethics, and organizational justice research.
2. Keywords
Honesty in Everyday Behaviour, HONBEH, consumer ethics, morally debatable behaviors, moral justification, opportunism, service guarantees, psychometrics, integrity measurement, behavioral ethics, moral disengagement, fraud propensity
3. Authors
The adaptation and operationalization of the Honesty in Everyday Behaviour (HONBEH) index within contemporary behavioral research was advanced by:
- Jochen Wirtz, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing and Vice Dean of MBA Programs, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore. An internationally recognized authority on service management, customer satisfaction, and service guarantee dynamics. Contact: [email protected].
- Doreen Kum, Ph.D. — Former Assistant Professor, Department of Marketing, NUS Business School, National University of Singapore. Specialized in consumer psychology, customer decision-making, and service recovery integrity.
The conceptual foundation originates from the sociometric work of Stephen D. Harding and David R. Phillips (1986), along with structural revisions introduced by Jerrold P. Katz, Virginia A. Swanson, and Lori A. Nelson (1994) in their validation of the Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale across cross-national samples.
4. Purpose
The primary purpose of the Honesty in Everyday Behaviour (HONBEH) scale is to measure an individual's subjective moral permissiveness toward common, non-violent ethical transgressions that occur in mundane daily interactions. In ethical philosophy and behavioral science, broad moral inventories often focus on severe moral violations such as violent crimes, corporate embezzlement, or profound political corruption. However, these severe scenarios generate extreme social desirability bias and ceiling/floor effects, as almost all respondents uniformly condemn high-severity acts. HONBEH addresses this measurement limitation by deliberately targeting the "gray zone" of moral decision-making—actions that violate legal or ethical norms but are frequently rationalized or perceived as low-consequence.
In applied research, particularly within consumer psychology and service marketing, HONBEH was adapted by Wirtz and Kum (2004) to solve a critical operational puzzle: identifying which psychological traits drive consumers to cheat on unconditional service guarantees, file false warranty claims, or abuse return policies. Service organizations frequently hesitate to implement generous customer satisfaction guarantees due to the perceived risk of widespread consumer fraud. HONBEH provides researchers and practitioners with an empirically grounded metric to examine whether customer cheating is driven by situational market factors (e.g., firm size, perceived unfairness) or dispositional moral elasticity.
Beyond consumer behavior, the scale serves critical functions in clinical, occupational, and organizational psychology. In organizational settings, HONBEH is utilized in personnel selection and integrity assessment to forecast counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs), such as time theft, misuse of company property, and subtle expense account padding. In academic settings, it assists researchers in modeling academic dishonesty, plagiarism, and unauthorized collaboration among students. From a clinical perspective, understanding an individual's moral baseline helps cognitive behavioral therapists and forensic evaluators diagnose patterns of antisocial personality traits, moral neutralization, and chronic rationalization of harm.
5. Psychological Construct
The Honesty in Everyday Behaviour scale operationalizes the psychological construct of moral acceptability of opportunistic behaviors. This construct does not simply measure whether a person self-reports being "honest" or "dishonest" in an abstract sense; rather, it measures their cognitive judgment regarding the situational permissibility of ethical rule violation. When faced with an ethical dilemma, individuals engage in rapid cognitive appraisals that weigh deontological duties against utilitarian calculations and personal self-interest. HONBEH captures the output of these appraisals across distinct sub-dimensions:
1. Active Rule-Breaking and Fraudulent Deception
This dimension encompasses intentional, proactive acts where an individual deliberately misrepresents facts or constructs a falsehood to obtain unmerited financial or material gain. Examples include:
- Claiming state welfare benefits to which one is not legally entitled.
- Cheating on income tax assessments if the opportunity arises.
- Fabricating dissatisfaction with a service or product specifically to trigger a money-back refund under an unconditional satisfaction guarantee.
- Purchasing an item of formal clothing, wearing it for an event, and returning it for a full refund (often termed "wardrobing").
Psychologically, active deception demands high executive engagement and deliberate overcoming of the behavioral inhibition system. Individuals who judge active deception as acceptable typically demonstrate elevated scores on Machiavellianism and high degrees of instrumental rationality.
2. Passive Opportunism and Situational Acquiescence
Passive opportunism reflects behaviors where the individual does not construct the deceptive scenario, but rather capitalizes on an environmental error, administrative oversight, or omission by another party for personal enrichment. Examples include:
- Failing to inform a cashier when they return too much change.
- Keeping money found lying on the pavement without making a reasonable attempt to find the owner.
- Remaining silent when a restaurant server or merchant fails to include an expensive item on the final bill.
- Using public transit networks without purchasing a ticket when automated barrier systems are broken or unmonitored.
From a psychometric standpoint, passive opportunism is widely recognized as having a significantly lower threshold of moral resistance. Individuals frequently employ moral justification and euphemistic labeling (e.g., "it was their mistake, not mine") to eliminate feelings of guilt, making this dimension highly sensitive to subtle individual differences in conscientiousness and moral identity.
6. Theoretical Framework
The HONBEH scale is anchored in three primary theoretical paradigms within psychological and behavioral economic science:
1. The Theory of Moral Disengagement
Formulated by Albert Bandura (1986, 1999), the Theory of Moral Disengagement posits that self-regulatory mechanisms govern moral conduct through self-monitoring, judgment, and affective self-reactions. Bandura demonstrated that moral self-sanctions can be selectively deactivated through eight psychological mechanisms: moral justification, euphemistic labeling, advantageous comparison, displacement of responsibility, diffusion of responsibility, disregarding or distorting consequences, dehumanization, and attribution of blame. The items in HONBEH operate directly at these deactivation nodes. When respondents mark an everyday transgression as "justifiable," they are deploying advantageous comparison (e.g., "corporations make billions, so keeping excess change is trivial") or displacement of responsibility (e.g., "the business should train its cashiers better").
2. Neutralization Theory
Grounded in the criminological sociology of Gresham Sykes and David Matza (1957), Neutralization Theory explains how individuals participate in rule-breaking without fully abandoning social norms. Actors employ rationalizations prior to the deviant act to neutralize moral guilt. The HONBEH scale measures the cognitive availability of these neutralization techniques—specifically the denial of injury (arguing that large corporate or governmental entities suffer no perceptible damage from minor theft) and the denial of the victim (viewing service providers as exploitative entities that deserve retribution).
3. Rational Choice and Self-Concept Maintenance
In behavioral economics and modern decision theory, Nina Mazar, On Amir, and Dan Ariely (2008) introduced the Theory of Self-Concept Maintenance. This framework posits that individuals balance two competing desires: the economic incentive to maximize self-interest through cheating versus the psychological need to view themselves as inherently honest and honorable people. Cheating is bounded by an internal elasticity threshold; people cheat only up to the point where they can still maintain an untarnished positive moral self-image. The HONBEH scale effectively measures the parameter of this elasticity threshold across a standard battery of standardized social and economic scenarios.
7. Validity
The construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity of the HONBEH scale has been substantiated across multiple empirical studies:
Construct Validity
Construct validity is evidenced through robust correlations with established psychometric scales measuring personal morality, ethics, and social responsibility. As demonstrated in initial validations of the MDBS framework (Harding & Phillips, 1986; Katz et al., 1994) and subsequent consumer ethics iterations (Muncy & Vitell, 1992), scale scores consistently align with underlying latent moral philosophies. High acceptability ratings on HONBEH correlate positively with ethical relativism and negatively with ethical idealism on Forsyth's (1980) Ethics Position Questionnaire (EPQ).
Convergent and Discriminant Validity
Wirtz and Kum (2004) established convergent validity by evaluating HONBEH alongside measures of consumer opportunism, Machiavellianism, and perceived fairness. The instrument demonstrated moderate-to-high positive correlations with consumer opportunism (r values ranging between .42 and .58, p < .001). Discriminant validity was confirmed through average variance extracted (AVE) analyses, where the AVE for the HONBEH construct exceeded the squared correlation between HONBEH and adjacent constructs such as service satisfaction, risk aversion, and general brand trust, confirming that everyday honesty is distinct from general consumer sentiment.
Predictive and Criterion Validity
Predictive validity is one of HONBEH's strongest empirical assets. In the experimental investigations conducted by Wirtz and Kum (2004), HONBEH significantly predicted actual consumer cheating behavior on service guarantees. In controlled scenario experiments involving full service guarantees, respondents with higher HONBEH scores (indicating high tolerance for everyday dishonest acts) exhibited a significantly higher probability of fabricating dissatisfaction to invoke monetary payouts (β = .34, p < .01). Furthermore, in field studies examining fare evasion on municipal transportation, scores on the passive opportunism items directly correlated with observed evasion infractions.
8. Reliability
Psychometric evaluations across various demographic and cultural cohorts confirm that the HONBEH scale possesses high internal consistency and measurement stability:
- Internal Consistency: In the landmark study by Wirtz and Kum (2004), the adapted 13-item measure yielded a composite Cronbach's alpha of α = .82, indicating strong inter-item covariance without item redundancy. Sub-dimensional analyses for active deception items consistently produce alpha values ranging from α = .81 to α = .86, whereas passive opportunism items yield alpha coefficients between α = .74 and α = .79 across studies.
- Composite Reliability: Confirmatory structural models typically report composite reliability (CR) coefficients exceeding .84, comfortably surpassing the standard psychometric cutoff of .70 recommended by Fornell and Larcker (1981).
- Test-Retest Stability: Studies employing longitudinal or multi-wave survey designs over intervals ranging from 4 to 8 weeks have reported test-retest correlation coefficients between r = .76 and r = .83, demonstrating that tolerance for everyday dishonesty represents a stable dispositional trait rather than a fleeting state-dependent reaction.
9. Factor Analysis
The structural dimensionality of the HONBEH scale has been rigorously examined using both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA):
Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)
Principal component analyses and maximum likelihood factor extractions with varimax or oblimin rotations typically reveal a distinct two-factor solution accounting for approximately 52% to 61% of the total variance:
- Factor 1: Active Illicit Gains / Deceitful Misrepresentation. This factor groups items characterized by proactive, premeditated violations, such as false insurance declarations, tax evasion, and active guarantee fraud. Item factor loadings on Factor 1 consistently range from .62 to .81.
- Factor 2: Passive / Opportunistic Rule Violations. This factor clusters items centered on capitalizing on systemic errors, such as keeping excess change or failing to report billing errors. Factor loadings on this dimension consistently span from .55 to .78.
Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)
CFA models specifying a correlated two-factor structure or a second-order global factor ("Everyday Dishonesty Tolerance") demonstrate superior model fit compared to a strict unidimensional model. Standard fit indices reported in structural equation modeling (SEM) studies include:
- Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Values typically range from .042 to .056 (with 90% confidence intervals bounded below .07), well within the threshold for acceptable model fit.
- Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Coefficients consistently exceed .94 (often ranging between .95 and .97).
- Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Coefficients regularly surpass the .93 benchmark.
- Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Values generally remain under .048.
Standardized factor loadings across all 13 items under their designated latent variables are statistically significant (p < .001), supporting the structural integrity of the instrument.
10. Instrument / Measurement Tool
The Honesty in Everyday Behaviour (HONBEH) instrument is structured as a standardized, self-report psychometric inventory:
- Instrument Type: Standardized Self-Report Attitudinal Inventory.
- Administration Format: Pen-and-paper or computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) / online survey platforms (Qualtrics, REDCap, SurveyMonkey).
- Target Population: General adult population (≥ 18 years), consumers, employees, and university cohorts.
- Item Count: 13 distinct behavioral vignette items.
- Response Scale: Typically administered using a continuous 10-point numerical rating scale, where:
- 1 = "Never justifiable" / "Completely unacceptable"
- 10 = "Always justifiable" / "Completely acceptable"
- (Alternatively, a 7-point Likert scale is frequently utilized in consumer research: 1 = "Strongly Disapprove / Never Justifiable" to 7 = "Strongly Approve / Completely Justifiable").
- Scoring Protocol:
- Composite Score: Calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean or sum of all 13 items. Scores range from 13 to 130 on the 10-point scale (or 13 to 91 on a 7-point scale). Higher scores indicate a higher tolerance for everyday dishonesty and greater propensity for opportunistic rule-breaking.
- Subscale Scores: Calculated separately for the Active Deception dimension and the Passive Opportunism dimension to delineate between active fraud potential and passive situational opportunism.
- Reverse Coding: None of the standard 13 items are reverse-coded; all scenarios are phrased in the direction of ethical transgression.
11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The operational adaptation of HONBEH for service and consumer research was formally published in 2004 by Jochen Wirtz and Doreen Kum in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. The scale items themselves draw from public-domain and academic sociological instruments originated in the 1980s and 1990s through the Morally Debatable Behaviors Scale (MDBS) and the World Values Survey.
For non-commercial academic research and instructional educational purposes, the instrument is generally accessible without licensing fees under standard academic fair-use guidelines, provided appropriate formal citation is given to the primary developers (Wirtz & Kum, 2004; Harding & Phillips, 1986). Commercial applications—including corporate pre-employment testing, commercial software deployment, or proprietary organizational audits—require explicit permission and potential licensing agreements with the copyright holders and publishing bodies (Springer Nature / Academy of Marketing Science).
12. References
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