Gender differences in face-to-face deceptive behavior

Abstract

We study the role of face-to-face interaction for gender differences in deceptive behavior and perceived honesty. In the first part, we compare women to men's deceptive behavior using data from an incentivized income-reporting experiment with three treatments. Reporting is fully computerized in a baseline treatment but occurs face-to-face in the second and third treatment. Lies can be detected in the course of an audit, which happens with a given probability in the first and second treatment whereas it depends on perceptions by others in the third treatment. In the computerized baseline treatment, men and women's deceptive behavior is statistically indistinguishable. However, women's truthfulness increases when face-to-face interaction is introduced in the second treatment. In contrast, males' deceptive behavior does not change until the audit probability depends on their perceived honesty in the third treatment. Then, men's truthfulness rises sharply and exceeds women's level of honesty by far. We elaborate on these gender differences in the second part. We conduct an experiment to assess the honesty of videotaped income-reporting statements from a setting identical to the third treatment. Our findings confirm that men anticipate their low perceived honesty, which is consistent with the results from the first part.

Gender and deception: Evidence from survey data among adolescent gamblers

“…suggesting either a neat difference-with females being more honest than males (e.g., Childs, 2012;Dreber & Johannesson, 2008;Muehlheusser et al, 2015)-or no differences at all (e.g., Capraro, 2018;Lohse & Qari, 2021). In contrast with some lab experiments showing that women are both more honest and less likely to use full deception than men (e.g., Duncan & Li, 2018;Fries et al, 2021)-we find that females tend to use deception less often than males but are more likely to use full deception.…”

“…Gender differences in deception have been carefully investigated in recent decades, although the evidence produced thus far provides an unclear and even contradictory picture (for reviews, see, e.g., Capraro, 2018, andLohse &Qari, 2021). 1 The majority of studies show that females are more likely to tell the truth than their male counterparts (e.g., Abeler et al, 2019;Cappelen et al, 2013;Conrads et al, 2014;Fries et al, 2021;Grosch & Rau, 2017;Houser et al, 2012;Houser et al, 2016;Rosenbaum et al, 2014).…”

“…carried out dice games involving two distinct set of participants, namely school-age students from 5 to 17 years old, and undergraduates. They found no gender differences in either sample.5 This even holds in the few contributions that have introduced face-to-face lying to analyze lie detection beliefs(Holm & Kawagoe, 2010;Lohse & Qari, 2021).6 On different (cheating) behavior between a student sample and a representative sample in the laboratory, see, e.g.,Fosgaard (2020). See alsoHartog et al (2002) andBeckmann and Menkhoff (2008).…”

How often do you cheat? Dispositional influences and intrapersonal stability of dishonest behavior

“…Waeber ( 2021 ) also reports that women are more honest on average than men in a task involving self-reported outcomes that influence their financial pay-out. Previous findings on deception in “ sender-receiver ” games (Dreber and Johannesson, 2008 ) or in a social interaction setting with face-to-face communication (Lohse and Qari, 2021 ) also lend support to this direction. Chowdhury et al ( 2021 ) present different results depending on specific experimental instructions.…”