Politicians lie, so do I

Abstract

This research analyzed whether political leaders make people lie via priming experiments. Priming is a non-conscious and implicit memory effect in which exposure to one stimulus affects the response to another. Following priming theories, we proposed an innovative concept that people who perceive leaders to be dishonest (such as liars) are likely to lie themselves.We designed three experiments to analyze and critically discussed the potential influence of prime effect on lying behavior, through the prime effect of French political leaders (including general politicians, presidents and parties). Experiment 1 discovered that participants with non-politician-prime were less likely to lie (compared to politician-prime). Experiment 2A discovered that, compared to Hollande-prime, Sarkozy-prime led to lying behavior both in gravity (i.e., bigger lies) and frequency (i.e., lying more frequently). Experiment 2B discovered that Republicans-prime yielded an impact on more lying behavior, and Sarkozy-prime made such impact even stronger. Overall, the research findings suggest that lying can be triggered by external influencers such as leaders, presidents and politicians in the organizations. Our findings have provided valuable insights into organizational leaders and managers in their personnel management practice, especially in the intervention of lying behavior. Our findings also have offered new insights to explain non-conscious lying behavior.

Oculomotor behavior tracks the effect of ideological priming on deception

“…Crucially, the absence of differences in the way left and right-wing politicians affected participants' deceptive behavior confirms our hypothesized "caste effect", namely the expression of a general mistrust towards the political system. This result in Italian voters follows what was recently found in a French study employing only pictures of politicians as prime stimuli 23 . The authors found that people tend to lie more when primed with stimuli representing politicians than when primed with non-politician stimuli (i.e., clergymen).…”

“…In fact, while clergymen triggered a sort of moral reminder -something already seen to promote honesty 1 -politicians may have triggered concepts of corruption that led participants to lie for personal purposes. This was confirmed by the fact that participants evaluated politicians as less honest and trustworthy than clergymen 23 .…”

“…Specifically, right-wing people endorse values related to self-enhancement (like power and achievement), while left-wing people endorse values related to self-transcendence (like benevolence and universalism) 18,19 . While a few studies reported effects of political ideology on social decisions such as trust and cooperation [20][21][22] , to the best of our knowledge only a study (in the French context) investigated whether priming political vs. non-political dimensions differentially influenced cheating behavior 23 .…”

Employee's lying behavior and the role of self-awareness

“…From a different but relevant perspective, envy restrains people from lying if lying brings greater benefits to others; that is, when lying benefits others more than the liar(s), liar(s) may feel envious and hence reduce the probability of lying (Celse et al , 2016). In a similar vein, scholars have found that lying can be triggered by leaders and managers in the organization; that is, if employees feel their leaders lying, employees per se become more likely to lie (Celse and Chang, 2017).…”

“…This design allowed participants to see dice readings through the peephole and only the participants could see the actual readings. Celse and Chang (2017) indicate that such design incurs a probability of lying, as participants may lie (e.g. reporting higher readings to gain more earnings) or not lie (e.g.…”