Clever enough to tell the truth

Bradley Ruffle

LCERPA Working Papers from Laurier Centre for Economic Research and Policy Analysis

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 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 the generalizability of this result.

Keywords: honesty; cognitive ability; soldiers; high non-monetary stakes; regression discontinuity design (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 M51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 42
Date: 2015-09-01, Revised 2015-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe and nep-neu
Note: LCERPA Working Paper No. 2015-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Clever enough to tell the truth (2017)
Working Paper: Clever Enough to Tell the Truth (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wlu:lcerpa:0093

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