Watching the Watchmen - Why Vigilance Fails as a Cognitive Explanation of Honest and Dishonest Behavior

Promoting honesty is considered a key endeavor in the betterment of our societies. However, our understanding of this phenomenon, and of its evil twin, dishonesty, is still lacking. In this text we explore in detail whether the model of vigilance and sanctions can help us understand honesty. Our analysis of the extant literature suggests that both internal and external vigilance models fall short of explaining honesty and dishonesty because of both conceptual problems and empirical inadequacy issues. Identifying these shortcomings allow us to suggest some possible directions of research.