Cheaters, Liars, or Both? A New Classification of Dishonesty Profiles

Abstract

Experimental studies of dishonesty usually rely on population-level analyses, which compare the distribution of claimed rewards in an unsupervised, self-administered lottery (e.g., tossing a coin) with the expected lottery statistics (e.g., 50/50 chance of winning). Here, we provide a paradigm that measures dishonesty at the individual level and identifies new dishonesty profiles with specific theoretical interpretations. We found that among dishonest participants, (a) some did not bother implementing the lottery at all, (b) some implemented but lied about the lottery outcome, and (c) some violated instructions by repeating the lottery multiple times until obtaining an outcome they felt was acceptable. These results held both in the lab and with online participants. In Experiment 1 ( N = 178), the lottery was a coin toss, which permitted only a binary honest/dishonest response; Experiment 2 ( N = 172) employed a six-sided-die roll, which permitted gradations in dishonesty. We replicated some previous results and also provide a new, richer classification of dishonest behavior.

Do Not Tell Me More; You Are Honest: A Preconceived Honesty Bias

“…In addition, Shalvi et al (2011) found that when people were allowed to repeat a task more than once but only the first result was valid for reporting purposes, the highest outcome was sometimes reported (even if it was not the first one). Pascual-Ezama et al (2020) found some additional profiles. In addition to the liars, they found cheater non-liars and radicals.…”

“…The first part of the experiment consisted of an adaptation of the die-under-the-cup task proposed by Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013), using the new paradigm proposed by Pascual-Ezama et al (2020). Participants were asked to roll the die in http://www.rollandflip.com or a similar website using their cell phone.…”

“…To confirm these hypotheses, we conducted a pilot study with 276 participants, in which we obtained very satisfactory preliminary data, and an experiment with more than 2,000 participants, in which they performed two tasks. The first task consisted of the adaptation of Pascual-Ezama et al (2020) for the die-under-thecup task of Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013). We decided to use this task, as it is one of the most popular literatures (e.g., Abeler et al, 2019;Charness et al, 2019), With this task, we managed to classify participants according to different profiles of (dis)honesty.…”

Heat and fraud: Evaluating how room temperature influences fraud likelihood

“…As this behavior provided a chance for increased rewards -similar to declaring a false result -we decided that a "re-roll" would also constitute an act of fraud, regardless of participants' self-reported results. The re-roll is considered as a new measure of dishonest behavior in a recent study (Pascual-Ezama, Prelec, Muñoz, & Gil-Gómez de Liaño, 2020).…”

Positive Emotion and Honesty

“… 1 As an alternative task, one could also employ the version of the dice-rolling task used by Pascual-Ezama et al ( 2020 ). In their version, participants roll a die electronically on a website provided by the experimenter and are asked to enter the result on their computer.…”