Revisiting regulatory fit and its effect on honesty: A replication attempt

Regulatory fit, which describes how people experience a sense of “rightness” when their motivational orientation matches their goal-pursuit strategies, has been studied in various domains of psychology. Recently, Achar and Lee (2022) found that regulatory fit might also play an important role in the moral domain. In particular, they report that regulatory fit intensifies people’s moral predisposition toward a range of behaviors and judgments across moral domains. We conducted three well-powered and preregistered close and conceptual replications (overall N = 3,150) in which we aimed to replicate and extend this line of research using honesty as a prominent example of moral behavior. In neither of our studies we found support for the proposed interaction between moral predispositions (as assessed via Moral Disengagement and Honesty-Humility) and the experience of regulatory fit on dishonest behaviors and intentions. The findings could reflect either limited robustness of the regulatory fit effect or of the regulatory fit manipulation.