Would I lie to you? On social preferences and lying aversion

Abstract

This paper reinterprets the evidence on lying or deception presented in Gneezy (2005, American Economic Review ). We show that Gneezy's data are consistent with the simple hypothesis that people are one of two kinds: either a person will never lie, or a person will lie whenever she prefers the outcome obtained by lying over the outcome obtained by telling the truth. This implies that so long as lying induces a preferred outcome over truth-telling, a person's decision of whether to lie may be completely insensitive to other changes in the induced outcomes, such as exactly how much she monetarily gains relative to how much she hurts an anonymous partner. We run new but broadly similar experiments to those of Gneezy in order to test this hypothesis. While we also confirm that there is an aversion to lying in our subject population, our data cannot reject the simple hypothesis described above either.Keywords: experimental economics, lying, deception, social preferences J.E.L. Classification: C91 * We thank Vince Crawford for encouragement and advice; Nageeb Ali, Jordi Brandts, Gary Charness, Arnaud Costinot, Nir Jaimovich, Ivana Komunjer, Albert Satorra, and Roberto Weber for comments and discussions; various seminar and conference audiences for feedback; and Tim Cason (the Editor) and two anonymous referees for very useful suggestions. We also thank Uri Gneezy for generously clarifying unpublished details about his experiments, and for bringing the work of Matthias Sutter to our attention.

White Lies

“…Our results also help in testing a recent explanation of Gneezy's (2005) result offered by Hurkens and Kartik (2009). They offer an explanation that is a special case of the Gneezy (2005) one.…”

“…7 To test their hypothesis, one needs to find a design in which social preferences work in the same way, and hence only the cost of lying is relevant. As noted, Gneezy's (2005) or Hurkens and Kartik's (2009) design cannot test this; our design can. In particular, inequity models, or any other model of social preferences we are aware of, would predict that a person with no lying costs in treatment T 10 10 strictly prefers 30 30 over 20 20 , and one in T 10 0 strictly prefers 30 20 over 20 20 .…”

“…In particular, inequity models, or any other model of social preferences we are aware of, would predict that a person with no lying costs in treatment T 10 10 strictly prefers 30 30 over 20 20 , and one in T 10 0 strictly prefers 30 20 over 20 20 . 8 Hence, Hurkens and Kartik (2009) predict that the same fraction of people will choose to lie in both cases. Because the difference between the fraction of participants who lie in T 10 10 (65%) and T 10 0 (52%) is large and significant (Z = 1 83, p = 0 03), we can reject their hypothesis.…”

License to Cheat: Voluntary Regulation and Ethical Behavior

“…For instance, Gneezy (2005) studied the extent to which a laboratory participant with private information will lie to an uninformed participant 6 about which of two possible actions is more profitable. He found that people are sensitive to both their potential gains from a lie and to their counterparts' potential losses (see also Croson 2005;Hurkens and Kartik, 2009;Sutter, 2009;Gibson, et al, forthcoming;Erat and Gneezy, forthcoming). Recent research also explores the conditions under which individuals lie about the outcome of a random process, such as a die roll, to gain more money from an experimenter (Gino and Ariely, 2012;Shalvi, et al, 2011;Fiscbacher and Heusi, 2008).…”

Deception and reception: The behavior of information providers and users

“…Our findings provide new evidence for the existence of moral individuals that reject economic incentives to deceive (Hurkens & Kartik, 2009;Gneezy et al, 2013). Furthermore, we provide evidence that only a minority of investors is overly optimistic about the proportion of moral individuals in the economy.…”