Deception and self-deception

Schwardmann, Peter; Weele, Joël van der

doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0666-7

Cited by 151 publications

(96 citation statements)

References 85 publications

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“…For example, one evolutionary reason why there could be differences in belief updating about ego-relevant characteristics in comparison to belief updating about external states that differ in financial rewards is the idea that ego maintainance can yield evolutionary benefits. A positive asymmetry in updating about one's self would lead to overconfident beliefs, and several authors have posited that maintaining a high self-confidence may be associated with evolutionary advantages (see, e.g., Bernardo and Welch 2001;Heifetz et al 2007;Johnson and Fowler 2011;Burks et al 2013;Schwardmann and Van der Weele 2019;Solda et al 2019;Coffman et al 2020). In contrast, asymmetric updating about external states of the world would lead to overoptimism which is likely to lead to costly mistakes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Belief updating: does the ‘good-news, bad-news’ asymmetry extend to purely financial domains?

Barron

2020

Exp Econ

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Bayes' statistical rule remains the status quo for modeling belief updating in both normative and descriptive models of behavior under uncertainty. Some recent research has questioned the use of Bayes' rule in descriptive models of behavior, presenting evidence that people overweight 'good news' relative to 'bad news' when updating ego-relevant beliefs. In this paper, we present experimental evidence testing whether this 'good-news, bad-news' effect is present in a financial decision making context (i.e. a domain that is important for understanding much economic decision making). We find no evidence of asymmetric updating in this domain. In contrast, in our experiment, belief updating is close to the Bayesian benchmark on average. However, we show that this average behavior masks substantial heterogeneity in individual updating behavior. We find no evidence in support of a sizeable subgroup of asymmetric updators.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Belief updating: does the ‘good-news, bad-news’ asymmetry extend to purely financial domains?

Barron

2020

Exp Econ

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“…Moreover, three papers tested for preference-biased inference with controls for priors or for prior-biased inference (Schwardmann and Van der Weele, 2016;Charness and Dave, 2017;Coutts, 2017) and reached different conclusions about the presence and direction of preference-biased inference. 72…”

Section: B Evidence and Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Errors in Probabilistic Reasoning and Judgment Biases

Benjamin

2018

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Errors in probabilistic reasoning have been the focus of much psychology research and are among the original topics of modern behavioral economics. This chapter reviews theory and evidence on this topic, with the goal of facilitating more systematic study of belief biases and their integration into economics. The chapter discusses biases in beliefs about random processes, biases in belief updating, the representativeness heuristic as a possible unifying theory, and interactions between biased belief updating and other features of the updating situation. Throughout, I aim to convey how much evidence there is for (and against) each putative bias, and I highlight when and how different biases may be related to each other. The chapter ends by drawing general lessons for when people update too much or too little, reflecting on modeling challenges, pointing to areas of economics to which the biases are relevant, and highlighting some possible directions for future work.

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“…Our working assumption is that given the opportunity, individuals will attempt to distort their beliefs in a convenient and self-serving way. Theoretical work points at the existence of the mechanism of belief distortion (i.e., Bénabou and Tirole, 2006;Benabou and Tirole, 2006) and experimental evidence suggests that beliefs matter for the deception of others and oneself and that the timing of belief-priming and incentives can bias assessments of conflict-of-interest and normative value judgments (Babcock et al, 1995;Schwardmann and van der Weele, 2017;Gneezy et al, 2018b). Unresolved, however, are questions pertaining to whether such a belief distortion works differently with respect to different parts of a social norm, empirical or normative, and to what extent such mechanisms differ with respect to the beneficiary of the lie.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

It's Not a Lie If You Believe It: Lying and Belief Distortion Under Norm-Uncertainty

Bicchieri,

Dimant

2018

SSRN Journal

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We explore the relationship between norm-uncertainty and lying. Lies are ubiquitous, and people often lie for their own benefit or for the benefit of others. Research in environments in which social norms are clearly defined and communicated finds that social norms influence personal decisions, even when they are not in our own self-interest. We deviate from this approach and study lying under norm uncertainty with scope for opportunistic interpretation of the norm. We introduce variation along three dimensions: salience of different types of norm-uncertainty (normative/empirical), the beneficiary of the lie (self/other), and ex-ante knowledge about the opportunity to tell a lie in order to tease out potential belief-distortion mechanisms. We also find compelling evidence that individuals engage in self-serving belief distortion to increase lying overall. However, we observe this only when uncertainty about what others do (empirical uncertainty), but not when uncertainty about what others approve of (normative uncertainty) is made salient. We also observe conditional liars, but only when the lie is self-serving rather than to the benefit of a third party. We discuss policy implications to improve the effectiveness of norm-based interventions.

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Deception and self-deception

Cited by 151 publications

References 85 publications

Belief updating: does the ‘good-news, bad-news’ asymmetry extend to purely financial domains?

Belief updating: does the ‘good-news, bad-news’ asymmetry extend to purely financial domains?

Errors in Probabilistic Reasoning and Judgment Biases

It's Not a Lie If You Believe It: Lying and Belief Distortion Under Norm-Uncertainty

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