Honesty as truthfulness: New trait and state measures of truthfulness to advance research and theorizing on when and why people are honest

Honesty is a highly valued social trait, but research into it is impeded because current measures of trait honesty both differ in their content coverage and neglect non-behavioral aspects of traits such as cognitions and motivations. Building on recent conceptual and empirical developments highlighting truthfulness as an important and perhaps central element of honesty, we developed and validated trait and state measures of truthful communication (six studies, total N = 2797). Applying these measures to a series of assessments of everyday honesty experiences indicated that state manifestations of truthfulness showed notable variability at both person and situation levels, correlated with trait levels of truthfulness, and systematically varied as a function of the goals people were pursuing in situations (consistent with predictions from Whole Trait Theory, a dynamic personality theory). This work provides conceptually grounded, psychometrically sound tools for researchers to precisely probe truthfulness as a feature of both persons and day-to-day experiences and highlights the functional nature of moral traits such as truthfulness.