Dishonesty Under Scrutiny

Abstract

Abstract:We investigate how different forms of scrutiny affect dishonesty, using Gneezy's (2005) deception game. We add a third player whose interests are aligned with those of the sender. We find that lying behavior is not sensitive to revealing the sender's identity to the observer. The option for observers to communicate with the sender, and the option to reveal the sender's lies to the receiver also do not affect lying behavior. Even more striking, senders whose identity is revealed to their observer do not lie less when their interests are misaligned with those of the observer. We are grateful to the Editor (Robert Slonim) and two anonymous referees for very valuable comments and suggestions, to B. von Hippel for useful discussions, to R. Cautain for programming the experiment and to Q. Thévenet and Z. Dai for valuable research assistance.

Deception and reciprocity

“…Overall, the percentage of Players A who followed the message was 72.2%. This follow rate is in line with reported follow rates from the literature (Gneezy 2005;Hurkens and Kartik 2009;van de Ven and Villeval 2015). In addition, in the Intentions treatments, Player A's following behavior was correlated with the kindness of her first-stage action: Player A was significantly less likely to follow Player B's message when she was unkind and sent zero tokens than when she was kind.…”

When foul play seems fair: Exploring the link between just deserts and honesty

“…In addition, previous studies find that the effect of having the experimenter or an anonymous observer to verify behavior is only minor (e.g. Bäker and Mechtel, 2015;van de Ven and Villeval, 2015;Houser et al, 2016;Gneezy et al, 2016). There are few recent studies that employ variants of the Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013)'s task with a "full information" set-up similar to ours.…”

The Impact of Peer Presence on Cheating

“…This might lead to less cheating in individual treatments. Nevertheless, two aspects made us opt for this design: First, van de Ven and Villeval (2015) show that the prospect of being known as a cheater does not affect the propensity to cheat. Second, not having the experimenter stay in the room would have generated larger distortions, as participants in individual treatments would have been completely free of social control, while in the peer treatments the peer would have added not only the element of motivation but also that of social control.…”