Experimental evidence on the transmission of honesty and dishonesty: A stairway to heaven and a highway to hell

Paola Colzani, Georgia Michailidou and Luis Santos-Pinto ()

Economics Letters, 2023, vol. 231, issue C

Abstract: Various theories of social behavior propose that individuals condition actions that involve a moral value by following each other’s behavior. The theoretical and experimental instruments employed to evaluate this conditioning often focus only on the diffusion of actions with negative moral value (e.g., dishonesty, norm violation, tax evasion). In this paper, we develop and execute a laboratory experiment to study the diffusion of actions with both, positive and negative moral values. We use a lying paradigm and introduce a novel methodology operationalizing beliefs as intention proxies to study the switch between honesty and dishonesty in simultaneous and sequential move sequences. The results indicate asymmetries; while lying is strongly contagious, truth-telling is weakly so.

Keywords: Lying; Truth-telling; Moral behavior; Conditional behavior; Laboratory experiment; Die-rolling paradigm (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 C91 C92 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecolet:v:231:y:2023:i:c:s0165176523002823

DOI: 10.1016/j.econlet.2023.111257

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