Does telling white lies signal pro-social preferences?

Abstract

The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one pushing towards telling the truth always and the other pushing towards helping others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What does telling a white lie signal about a person’s pro-social tendencies? To answer this question, we conducted a two-stage 2x2 experiment. In the first stage, we used a Deception Game to measure aversion to telling a Pareto white lie (i.e., a lie that helps both the liar and the listener), and aversion to telling an altruistic white lie (i.e., a lie that helps the listener at the expense of the liar). In the second stage we measured altruistic tendencies using a Dictator Game and cooperative tendencies using a Prisoner’s dilemma. We found three major results: (i) both altruism and cooperation are positively correlated with aversion to telling a Pareto white lie; (ii) both altruism and cooperation are negatively correlated with aversion to telling an altruistic white lie; (iii) men are more likely than women to tell an altruistic white lie, but not to tell a Pareto white lie. Our results shed light on the moral conflict between prosociality and truth-telling. In particular, the first finding suggests that a significant proportion of people have non-distributional notions of what the right thing to do is, irrespective of the economic consequences, they tell the truth, they cooperate, they share their money.

Between me and we: The importance of self-profit versus social justifiability for ethical decision making

“…For instance, in a set of studies, participants' payoff for the number of allegedly solved tasks was either given to the participant herself (pro-self cheating), split between her and another participant (self-other cheating), or entirely given to another participant (other-only cheating) (Gino, Ayal & Ariely, 2013;Wiltermuth, 2011). Participants cheated significantly more when cheating incurred a personal benefit and was socially justifiable (i.e., self-other cheating) than when either self-profit or social justifications were present (i.e., pro-self or other-only cheating; for similar findings see also Biziou-van-Pol, Haenen, Novaro, Liberman & Capraro, 2015). The authors concluded that individuals care about both self-profit and justifications in their decision to behave dishonestly.…”

Gender differences in lying in sender-receiver games: A meta-analysis

“…Subsequently, Erat and Gneezy (2012) observed that the sign of gender differences in lying might depend on the consequences of the lie: they found that males lie more than females in the context of Pareto white lies (lies that benefit both the liar and another person), but females lie more than males in the context of altruistic white lies (lies that benefit another person at a cost for the liar). However, the former result was not replicated by Cappelen et al (2013), who found no gender differences in the context of Pareto white lies; and the latter result was not replicated by Biziou- van-Pol et al (2015), who, in fact, found the opposite, that males tell more altruistic white lies than females. These mixed results suggest that gender differences in lying, if they exist, might be small and dependent on the consequences of lying.…”

“…Only Player 1 knows the exact allocations of money corresponding to Option A and Option B. One variant of the deception game was introduced by Biziou- van-Pol et al (2015), in order to avoid the problem of sophisticated deception (i.e., Player 1 telling the truth because he or she expects that Player 2 will not believe him or her, Sutter 2009). In this variant, Player 2 has no active choice: whether participants are paid according to Option A or Option B depends only on whether Player 1 decides to lie or to tell the truth.…”

“…Although standard economic theory predicts that people would lie as long as that is beneficial to themselves, empirical research in economics and psychology has shown that people do not always lie. Cases in which people act honestly abound, even when being dishonest would be beneficial to all parties involved (Erat & Gneezy, 2012;Cappelen, Sørensen & Tungodded, 2013;Biziou-van-Pol, Haenen, Novaro, Occhipinti-Liberman & Capraro, 2015).…”

“…Previous studies have approached this question from several angles. For example, scholars have explored the role of social and moral preferences (Biziou-van-Pol et al, 2015;Levine & Schweitzer, 2014;Levine & Schweitzer, 2015;Shalvi & de Dreu, 2014;Weisel & Shalvi, 2015), the role of incentives (Dreber & Johannesson, 2008;Erat & Gneezy, 2012;Fischbacher & Föllmi-Heusi, 2013;Gneezy, 2005;Gneezy, Kajackaite & Sobel, 2018;Mazar, Amir & Ariely, 2008;Sutter, 2009), the role of group-serving lies versus individual-serving lies (Cohen, Gunia, Kim-Jun & Murnighan, 2009;Conrads, Irlenbusch, Rilke & Walkowitz, 2013;Gino, Ayal & Ariely, 2013;Wiltermuth, 2011), and the role of manipulating cognitive resources (Gino, Schweitzer, Mead & Ariely, 2011;Shalvi, Eldar & Bereby-Meyer, 2012;Gunia et al, 2012;van't Veer, Stel & van Beest, 2014;Capraro, 2017;Barcelo & Capraro, 2017;Lohse, Simon & Konrad, 2018).…”