Experimental Evidence on the Transmission of Honesty and Dishonesty: A Stairway to Heaven and a Highway to Hell

Dynamic valuation bias explains social influence on cheating behavior

“…Moreover, the conformity parameter of the Dynamic Bias computational model was significantly higher when participants observed the behavior of the Dishonest Group than the Honest Group. This result echoes with previous research showing that anti-social behaviors such as cheating are more contagious than prosocial behavior or honesty (11, 30, 31). In addition, social proximity exacerbates this asymmetry (11) and can improve social learning (36).…”

“…With this manipulation, we assessed the effect of social influence in two different contexts. These two contexts have been shown to lead to different levels of conformity because anti-social and dishonest behavior appears to be more contagious than prosocial behavior (11, 30, 31). The experiment was divided into three blocks.…”

Individual oath-swearing and lying under peer pressure

“…This asymmetric conformity has been documented in a tax evasion game(Lefebvre et al, 2015) and a die-rolling paradigm(Colzani et al, 2023) Innes and Mitra (2013). reported symmetric conformity in a deception game with samples in India, but asymmetric conformity in the samples in the USA.7 This is consistent with the justified-ethicality perspective ofLeib et al (2021) which posits that the individual likelihood to engage in a collaborative dishonesty is driven by prosocial concerns towards group members and is attenuated by the honest-image concerns.…”

Earn More Tomorrow: Overconfidence, Income Expectations and Consumer Indebtedness

“…5 Based on this evidence it seems justified to rely on the hard-easy effect to produce different degrees of overplacement. Besides, several contemporaneous papers in economics have used a similar treatment manipulation (Dargnies, Hakimov and Kübler, 2019;Klühs, Koch and Stein, 2019;Colzani and Santos-Pinto, 2021;Barron and Gravert, 2022;Bruhin, Petros and Santos-Pinto, 2022). Participants in the easy treatment are thus predicted to expect a higher absolute income than participants in the hard treatment.…”

“…TableD.2. Economic studies using the hard-easy effect as treatment manipulation : The table summarizes results by us,Dargnies, Hakimov and Kübler (2019),Barron and Gravert (2022),Klühs, Koch and Stein (2019),Colzani and Santos-Pinto (2021), andBruhin, Petros and Santos-Pinto (2022). The table focuses on the first stage of the experiments (treatment manipulation) that involves a trivia quiz or similar task.…”