Preferences for Truth‐Telling

By Johannes Abeler, Daniele Nosenzo, Collin Raymond. Econometrica, 2016

614 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Private information is at the heart of many economic activities. For decades, economists have assumed that individuals are willing to misreport private information if this maximizes their material payoff. We combine data from 90 experimental studies in economics, psychology, and sociology, and show that, in fact, people lie surprisingly little. We then formalize a wide range of potential explanations for the observed behavior, identify testable predictions that can distinguish between the models, and conduct new experiments to do so. Our empirical evidence suggests that a preference for being seen as honest and a preference for being honest are the main motivations for truth‐telling.

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Citations in the corpus

Language and Consumer Dishonesty: A Self-Diagnosticity Theory (2021, background): “There is over-whelming evidence that people are inclined to tell the truth, even when the payoff of lying is substantial and the risk of being caught is nonexistent (for a meta-analytic review, see Abeler, Nosenzo, and Raymond 2019).”
Who lies? A large-scale reanalysis linking basic personality traits to unethical decision making (2018, background): “In a recent meta-analysis, Abeler et al. (2016) showed that women cheat less than men and also found a (nonsignificant) trend that older participants cheat less than younger participants (see also Bucciol, Landini & Piovesan, 2013).”
Requiem for a Nudge: Framing effects in nudging honesty (2020, unknown): “, 2019), which should be studied both in the lab and in the field to address challenges with respect to disentangling the underlying mechanisms for deviant behavior using this and related cheating paradigms (see extensive discussions and results presented in, e.g., Hao and Houser, 2017; Abeler et al”