Fairness and cheating

By Daniel Houser, Stefan Vetter, Joachim Winter. 2012

318 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present evidence from a laboratory experiment showing that individuals who believe they were treated unfairly in an interaction with another person are more likely to cheat in a subsequent unrelated game. Specifically, subjects first participated in a dictator game. They then flipped a coin in private and reported the outcome. Subjects could increase their total payoff by cheating, i.e., lying about the outcome of the coin toss. We found that subjects were more likely to cheat in reporting the outcome of the coin flip when: 1) they received either nothing or a very small transfer from the dictator; and 2) they claimed to have been treated unfairly. This is consistent with the view that experiencing a norm violation is sufficient to justify the violation of another norm at the expense of a third party. This result extends the growing literature on social norms.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51b76ad9723e11f09e955dd970bec95bd4ac4802

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Citations in the corpus

Gender Differences in Honesty: The Role of Social Value Orientation (2017, methodology): “This is shown in the lab (e.g., Erat and Gneezy, 2012; Houser et al., 2012; Conrads et al., 2014; Kocher et al., 2016)(2) and in the field (Azar et al.”
Let’s be honest: A review of experimental evidence of honesty and truth-telling (2014, background): “…examining sequential-task cheating strongly suggests that individuals will be more inclined to act dishonesty if they believe that they have behaved in a morally-acceptable fashion previously or intend to do so subsequently (Houser et al., 2012; Mazar & Zhong, 2010; Ploner & Regner, 2013).”
Laboratory Measure of Cheating Predicts School Misconduct (2018, unknown): “14The calculation of percentage of misreported coin tosses is straightforward if we assume that none of the participants cheated to his or her disadvantage (see Houser et al. 2012). Let h be the percentage of coins taken from the envelopes and m be the percentage of misreported coin tosses. For any ”
Representative evidence on lying costs (2014, methodology): “Houser et al. (2012) conduct a 1-coin lab experiment and find similar levels of lying as in our lab experiments, replicating the other side of our results.”
Honesty on the Streets. A Field Study on Newspaper Purchasing (2013, background): “Moreover, a recent wave of laboratory experiments has established the existence of a preference for honesty (Fischbacher and Heusi 2013; Mazar, Amir, and Ariely 2008; Gibson, Tanner, and Wagner 2013; Houser, Vetter, and Winter 2012).”
Why Do We Lie? A Practical Guide To The Dishonesty Literature (2018, methodology): “Finally, Houser et al. (2012) find that when actually treated unfairly by someone else subjects are also more likely to cheat to restore the unfair ‘balance’ they have recently experienced.”
Preferences for Truth‐Telling (2016, background): “1D2 Houser et al. 2012 3 740 Germany coin toss 1D2 Houser et al. 2016 * 2 72 USA coin toss asy.”
Gender Differences in Honesty: Groups Versus Individuals (2015, unknown): “…than females, but often the effect is small or not statistically significant (Dreber and Johannesson, 2008; Childs, 2012; Erat and Gneezy, 2012; Houser, Vetter, and Winter, 2012; Conrads, Irlenbusch, Rilke, and Walkowitz, 2013; Conrads, Irlenbusch, Rilke, Schielke, and Walkowitz, 2014; Abeler,…”