On Lies and Hard Truths.

Sascha Behnk,Ernesto Reuben

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.687913

Abstract

We run an experimental study using sender-receiver games to evaluate how senders' willingness to lie to others compares to their willingness to tell hard truths, i.e., promote an outcome that the sender knows is unfair to the receiver without explicitly lying. Unlike in previous work on lying when it has consequences, we do not find that antisocial behavior is less frequent when it involves lying than when it does not. In fact, we find the opposite result in the setting where there is social contact between senders and receivers, and receivers have enough information to judge whether they have been treated unfairly. In this setting, we find that senders prefer to hide behind a lie and implement the antisocial outcome by being dishonest rather than by telling the truth. These results are consistent with social image costs depending on the social proximity between senders and receivers, especially when receivers can judge the kindness of the senders' actions.

Highlights

An extensive body of literature has shown that individuals face psychological costs from lying to others and has identified various factors moderating these costs1
Our sample consists of 120 receivers and 114 senders: 57 senders in the Hard Truth condition (19 senders in each of the three treatments) and 57 senders in the Lying condition (19 senders in Baseline, 18 in Face to Face, and 20 in Face to Face & Information
We investigate under which circumstances an antisocial action that involves a lie could be preferred over an otherwise identical antisocial action that is truthful

Summary

Introduction

An extensive body of literature has shown that individuals face psychological costs from lying to others and has identified various factors moderating these costs. Khalmetski and Sliwka (2019) developed a model that predicts partial lying due to image costs in the Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013) die-rolling paradigm. Their findings indicate that individuals with a strong reputation sensitivity cover their lies by not always lying maximally and, reducing their social image costs. Other studies substantiate these findings in different versions of the die-rolling paradigm by showing that social image costs mediate lying costs (Gneezy et al, 2018; Bašic and Quercia, 2020). We explore circumstances under which implementing an antisocial outcome through a lie can be preferred to implementing it without lying

Methods

Results

Conclusion