Study "Improving insurance claim forms"

Debriefing

Thank you for participating in this study. You are almost finished. First of all, good news! Regardless of what we told you before, you will receive the $0.50 bonus (and the initial $0.50, with a total of $1.00) and positive feedback on your MTurk account.

However, the real purpose of this study was not improving insurance claim forms, but it was actually studying people’s willingness to cheat. We are interested to learn how cheating is affected by previously having experienced an unfair situation. To this end, we created three scenarios. We only accepted 1/3 of the claims, and rejected 2/3 of the insurance claims. Half of the rejected claims were rejected "fairly", based on the maximum length of the holiday, whilst the other half of the rejected claims was rejected "unfairly", based on the ambiguous concept of negligence. The initial rejection of the insurance claim will have led participants to believe they missed out on the $0.50 bonus. Subsequently, participants were provided with the opportunity to change details in their insurance claim in the hope to get their claim accepted and receive the bonus. We will measure if people changed details in their claim, and we expect to find that people who were rejected unfairly were more likely to change details than people who were rejected fairly.

Because the main goal of this study was to learn if people would cheat when being treated unfairly, cheating will not lead to negative feedback on your MTurk account.