The Truth-Telling of Truth-Seekers: Evidence from Online Experiments with Scientists

Moritz Drupp, Menusch Khadjavi and Rudi Voss

No 10897, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: Academic honesty is crucial for scientific advancement, yet replication crises and misconduct scandals are omnipresent. We provide evidence on scientists’ truth-telling from two incentivized coin-tossing experiments with more than 1,300 scientists. Experiment I, with predominantly European and North-American scientists, shows that fewer scientists over-report winning tosses when their professional identity is salient. The global Experiment II yields heterogeneous effects. We replicate Experiment I’s effect for North-American scientists, but find the opposite for Southern European and East-Asian scientists. Over-reporting correlates with publication metrics and country-level measures of academic and field-experimental dishonesty, suggesting that country-level honesty norms also guide truth-telling by scientists.

Keywords: truth-telling; lying; identity; science; cross-country; experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D82 J45 K42 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-law, nep-lma and nep-sog
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10897

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