 Dishonesty and mandatory mask wearing in the COVID-19 pandemicYossef Tobol, Erez Siniver and Gideon Yaniv Economics Letters, 2020, vol. 197, issue C Abstract: In an attempt to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, an increasing number of countries, including Israel, have made wearing masks mandatory for their citizens not just in closed public places but also while walking in the streets. Failing to comply with this regulation entails a fine enforced by the police. Still, while many passersby do wear a mask that covers both their mouth and nose, others wear a mask improperly around their chin or neck or walk the streets wearing no mask at all. We speculate that the former passersby prepare themselves for a possible encounter with a police officer, in which case they could lie and claim that their mask unnoticeably slipped down from its proper position. The present paper reports the results of a field experiment designed to examine the hypothesis that, given the opportunity, passersby who wear their mask around their chin or neck are more likely to lie than those who wear no mask at all, although intuition may suggest otherwise. Incentivizing passersby’s dishonesty with the Die-Under-the-Cup (DUCT) task, the experiment results support our hypothesis. Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic; Dishonesty; Lying; Die-Under-the-Cup task (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:197:y:2020:i:c:s0165176520303773 DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2020.109617 Access Statistics for this article Economics Letters is currently edited by Economics Letters Editorial Office More articles in Economics Letters from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.