On the Origins of Dishonesty: From Parents to Children

Daniel Houser, John List, Marco Piovesan, Anya Samek and Joachim Winter ()

No 20897, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Acts of dishonesty permeate life. Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economics approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different economic environments. We begin by developing a simple model that highlights the channels through which one can increase or decrease dishonest acts. We lend empirical insights into this model by using an experiment that includes both parents and their young children as subjects. We find that the highest level of dishonesty occurs in settings where the parent acts alone and the dishonest act benefits the child rather than the parent. In this spirit, there is also an interesting effect of children on parents’ behavior: in the child’s presence, parents act more honestly, but there are gender differences. Parents act more dishonestly in front of sons than daughters. This finding has the potential of shedding light on the origins of the widely documented gender differences in cheating behavior observed among adults.

JEL-codes: C9 C91 C93 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-exp
Note: PE
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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Working Paper: On the Origins of Dishonesty: from Parents to Children (2015)
Working Paper: On the Origins of Dishonesty: From Parents to Children (2015)
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