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Who never tells a lie?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Christoph Vanberg
Christoph Vanberg*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, University of Heidelberg, Bergheimer Str. 58, 69115 Heidelberg, Germany
*
[email protected]; [email protected]
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Abstract

I experimentally investigate the hypothesis that many people avoid lying even in a situation where doing so would result in a Pareto improvement. Replicating (Erat and Gneezy, Management Science 58, 723–733, 2012), I find that a significant fraction of subjects tell the truth in a sender-receiver game where both subjects earn a higher payoff when the partner makes an incorrect guess regarding the roll of a die. However, a non-incentivized questionnaire indicates that the vast majority of these subjects expected their partner not to follow their message. I conduct two new experiments explicitly designed to test for a ‘pure’ aversion to lying, and find no evidence for the existence of such a motivation. I discuss the implications of the findings for moral behavior and rule following more generally.

Keywords

LyingDeceptionMoralityEthicsExperimentsC91D83
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , June 2017 , pp. 448 - 459
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-016-9491-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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