Who never tells a lie?

Christoph Vanberg

No 581, Working Papers from University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics

Abstract: Erat and Gneezy (2012) conduct an experiment to test whether people avoid lying in a situation where doing so would lead to a Pareto improvement. They conclude that many people exhibit such a "pure lie aversion." I argue that the experiment does not provide a reliable test for such an aversion, and that the evidence does not support the authors' conclusion. I conduct two new experiments which are 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: Lying; Deception; Morality; Ethics; Experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hpe
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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Journal Article: Who never tells a lie? (2017)
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