Honesty: Conceptualization, Assessment, Prediction, and Processes

The present Virtual Special Issue (VSI) focuses on honesty, a construct of foundational importance for social life that remains conceptually and empirically challenging because it spans partially overlapping components (e.g., truthfulness and non-exploitation) and is inherently difficult to measure using self-reports. The seven contributions in this VSI advance three intertwined aims. First, they sharpen conceptualization and assessment by contrasting honesty-as-non-exploitation with honesty-as-truthfulness and by introducing complementary measurement approaches, including new truthfulness scales and a psycholexically grounded adjective checklist. Second, they consolidate evidence on the prediction of (dis)honest behavior, showing robust associations with broad moral versus exploitative trait dispositions and clarifying limited incremental value of several adjacent trait measures in cheating paradigms. Third, they move beyond prediction to processes by testing when and why trait–dishonesty links emerge, highlighting the roles of justifications, motive-relevant contexts, and sensitivity to sanctions. Overall, this VSI advances our understanding of honesty by integrating conceptual and assessment precision, predictive research, and process-oriented inquiries into a cohesive research agenda that defines the next generation of honesty research from a personality perspective.