Experimental Evidence on the Transmission of Honesty and Dishonesty: A Stairway to Heaven and a Highway to Hell

Abstract

Various theories of social behavior propose that individuals condition actions that involve a moral value by following each other’s behavior. The theoretical and experimental instruments employed to evaluate this conditioning, often focus only on the diffusion of actions with negative moral value (e.g. dishonesty, norm violation, tax evasion). In this paper, we develop and execute a laboratory experiment to study the diffusion of actions with both, positive and negative moral values. We use a lying dilemma to study the diffusion of honesty and dishonesty in a simultaneous and a sequential move sequence. The results indicate that dishonesty is more contagious than honesty. While individuals switch from truth telling to lying when they observe another lying, they do not switch from lying to truth-telling when they observe another telling the truth.