You Can’t Hide Your Lying Eyes: Honesty Oaths and Misrepresentation

J. Jobu Babin, Haritima S. Chauhan and Feng Liu

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2022, vol. 98, issue C

Abstract: Lying about race or personal characteristics for a job or in college admissions is common and has recently become a high profile issue. In this paper, we explore the decision to misrepresent oneself and determine how honesty oaths impact personal characteristic reporting. To do this, we execute an experiment on Amazon MTurk, using a self-reporting task involving human eye color. We find that honesty oaths elicit more truthful behavior – primarily reducing implausible lies (maximal outcome lies). As a result, we spent 27.6% less on bonuses than we would have without oath-taking. There is some evidence that if one believes lying is common, they are more likely to lie as well. We conclude that oaths decrease extreme misrepresentation and expectations of group behavior significantly impact the decision to deceive.

Keywords: oaths; lying; misrepresentation; eye color; beliefs; deception (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C90 D90 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:98:y:2022:i:c:s2214804322000544

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2022.101880

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