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Time is a crucial determinant of deception, since some misreporting opportunities come as a surprise and require an intuitive decision while others allow for extensive reflection time. This paper provides experimental evidence on the role of the time dimension for dishonest decision-making. We conduct a laboratory experiment of self-serving deceptive behavior and exogenously vary the level of reflection time. We find that time pressure leads to more honesty compared to sufficient contemplation time. Moreover, dishonest subjects need more response time compared to honest subjects. In addition, we decompose misreporting into two components: first, the cognition process of the misreporting opportunity and, second, the conscious decision to misreport. This decomposition reveals that more reflection time increases awareness of the misreporting opportunity. However, it has no effect on the conscious decision of whether to misreport or not. Due to subjects' lack of awareness under time pressure we conclude that misreporting is not the intuitive response.
