Clever enough to tell the truth

Bradley Ruffle and Yossef Tobol
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Yossef Tobol: Jerusalem College of Technology

Experimental Economics, 2017, vol. 20, issue 1, No 6, 130-155

Abstract: Abstract We conduct a field experiment on 427 Israeli soldiers who each rolled a six-sided die in private and reported the outcome. For every point reported, the soldier received an additional half-hour early release from the army base on Thursday afternoon. We find that the higher a soldier’s military entrance score, the more honest he is on average. We replicate this finding on a sample of 156 civilians paid in cash for their die reports. Furthermore, the civilian experiments reveal that two measures of cognitive ability predict honesty, whereas general self-report honesty questions and a consistency check among them are of no value. We provide a rationale for the relationship between cognitive ability and honesty and discuss its generalizability.

Keywords: Honesty; Cognitive ability; Soldiers; High non-monetary stakes; C93; M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Clever Enough to Tell the Truth (2016)
Working Paper: Clever enough to tell the truth (2015)
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DOI: 10.1007/s10683-016-9479-y

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