Context-dependent cheating: Experimental evidence from 16 countries

Abstract

Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across 16 countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries.

Honesty, beliefs about honesty, and economic growth in 15 countries

“…It has been used in several previous experiments (e.g. Bucciol and Piovesan 2011;Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi 2013;Abeler, Becker and Falk 2014;Pascual-Ezama et al 2015). …”

“…Holm and Kawagoe (2010) run a sender-receiver game in Sweden and Japan, finding no differences in average levels of truth-telling. Pascual-Ezama et al (2015) report an experiment among university students in 16 countries. Subjects were asked to flip a coin and report the result; reporting heads was rewarded with a chocolate.…”

Students Cheat More: Comparing the Dishonesty of a Student Sample and a Representative Sample in the Laboratory*

“…The study of dishonest behavior has been the focus of a thriving research field for the last two or three decades. The fact that many people engage in dishonesty is well documented in this literature, although typically people do not cheat at the maximum possible level (Gneezy, ; Mazar et al ., ; Shu and Gino, ; Shu et al ., ; Fischbacher and Föllmi‐Heusi, ; Fosgaard et al ., ; Pascual‐Ezama et al ., ; Abeler et al ., ; Jacobsen et al ., ).…”

Leadership and Persistency in Spontaneous Dishonesty

“…Current research in behavioral science explores factors that influence the intensity and range of individual dishonesty (Abeler, Becker, & Falk, 2014;Conrads, Irlenbusch, Rilke, & Walkowitz, 2013;Conrads & Lotz 2015;Fischbacher & Föllmi-Heusi, 2013;Pascual-Ezama et al, 2015). In general, there is consensus that dishonesty is prevalent among humans, though, when given the opportunity, people do not cheat to the fullest extent possible (Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008).…”