Bilinguals use languages strategically and make decisions differently depending on the language context. Here, we explored whether verbal feedback modulates language use and risk-taking in bilinguals engaged in a coin-drawing game that incentivises lying. In the game, participants announced bets in Chinese or English, and feedback on the outcome of the current bet was given in the same language. They selected Chinese over English after receiving positive feedback in Chinese, and no language difference was found when feedback was provided in English. They also tended to take more risks after receiving positive than negative feedback. Furthermore, participants were more likely to switch from one language to the other following negative feedback as compared to positive feedback, and when telling the truth, they were faster after negative than positive feedback. Thus, the language in which bilinguals receive feedback constrains language use, which may have implications for understanding interactions in multilingual communities.

I experimentally investigate the hypothesis that many people avoid lying even in a situation where doing so would result in a Pareto improvement. Replicating (Erat and Gneezy, Management Science 58, 723–733, 2012), I find that a significant fraction of subjects tell the truth in a sender-receiver game where both subjects earn a higher payoff when the partner makes an incorrect guess regarding the roll of a die. However, a non-incentivized questionnaire indicates that the vast majority of these subjects expected their partner not to follow their message. I conduct two new experiments explicitly designed to test for a ‘pure’ aversion to lying, and find no evidence for the existence of such a motivation. I discuss the implications of the findings for moral behavior and rule following more generally.

We use different incentive schemes to study truth-telling in a die-roll task when people are asked to reveal the number rolled privately. We find no significant evidence of cheating when there are no financial incentives associated with the reports, but do find evidence of such when the reports determine financial gains or losses (in different treatments). We find no evidence of loss aversion in the standard case in which subjects receive their earnings in a sealed envelope at the end of the session. When subjects manipulate the possible earnings, we find evidence of less cheating, particularly in the loss setting; in fact, there is no significant difference in behavior between the non-incentivized case and the loss setting with money manipulation. We interpret our findings in terms of the moral cost of cheating and differences in the perceived trust and beliefs in the gain and the loss frames.

We examine the interplay between unethical behaviour and competition with a lab experiment. Subjects play the role of firms in monopoly, weak competition (Bertrand–Edgeworth duopoly) or strong competition (Bertrand duopoly). Costs are determined either by a computer draw or a self-reported die roll, and pricing decisions are made with knowledge of one’s own costs and—in duopoly—the rival firm’s costs. Under self-reporting, lying is profitable and undetectable except statistically. We find that competition and lying are mutually reinforcing. We observe strong evidence that (behavioural) competition in both duopoly treatments is more intense when lying is possible: prices are significantly lower than when lying is impossible, even controlling for differences in costs. We also observe more lying under duopoly than monopoly—despite the greater monetary incentives to lie in the monopoly case—though these differences are not always significant.

This paper reinterprets the evidence on lying or deception presented in Gneezy (Am. Econ. Rev. 95(1):384-394, 2005). We show that Gneezy's data are consistent with the simple hypothesis that people are one of two kinds: either a person will never lie, or a person will lie whenever she prefers the outcome obtained by lying over the outcome obtained by telling the truth. This implies that so long as lying induces a preferred outcome over truth-telling, a person's decision of whether to lie may be completely insensitive to other changes in the induced outcomes, such as exactly how much she monetarily gains relative to how much she hurts an anonymous partner. We run new but broadly similar experiments to those of Gneezy in order to test this hypothesis. While we also confirm that there is an aversion to lying in our subject population, our data cannot reject the simple hypothesis described above either.

Studying the likelihood that individuals cheat requires a valid statistical measure of dishonesty. We develop an easy empirical method to measure and compare lying behavior within and across studies to correct for sampling errors. This method estimates the full distribution of lying when agents privately observe the outcome of a random process (e.g., die roll) and can misreport what they observed. It provides a precise estimate of the mean and confidence interval (offering lower and upper bounds on the proportion of people lying) over the full distribution, allowing for a vast range of statistical inferences not generally available with the existing methods.

The expanding literature on lying has exclusively considered lying behavior within a one-dimensional context. While this has been an important first step, many real-world contexts involve the possibility of simultaneously lying in more than one dimension (e.g., reporting one’s income and expenses in a tax declaration). We experimentally investigate individual lying behavior in one- and two-dimensional contexts to understand how the multi-dimensionality of a decision affects lying behavior. Our paper provides the first evidence regarding the pure effect of dimensionality on lying behavior. Using a two-dimensional die-roll task, we show that participants distribute lies unevenly across dimensions, which results in greater over-reporting of the lower-outcome die.

Misreporting—a form of lying—is common in online labor and remote work settings. We execute an experiment on Amazon MTurk to determine how ex-ante honesty oaths and worker beliefs impact lying behavior across a range of plausible and implausible lies. Using a novel quantile-style exposition of the types of lies reported, we find that oaths elicit more truthful behavior, reducing both small, plausible lies and large, implausible ones. Shirking is reduced under oath. Worker expectations of group reporting are positively related to individual reporting of plausible lies.

Garbarino et al. (J Econ Sci Assoc. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40881-018-0055-4, 2018) describe a new method to calculate the probability distribution of the proportion of lies told in “coin flip” style experiments. I show that their estimates and confidence intervals are flawed. I demonstrate two better ways to estimate the probability distribution of what we really care about—the proportion of liars—and I provide R software to do this.

Alan Strudler’s “Lying about Reservation Prices in Business Negotiation: A Qualified Defense” challenges a number of claims I make in a prior essay, “A Lie Is a Lie: The Ethics of Lying in Business Negotiations.” Here, I examine Strudler’s critique and seek to refute his various arguments—in particular, those based on assumption of risk and the signalling value of reservation price lies.

Among the people who have been hailed for being particularly authentic are notorious liars. But this seems like a contradiction. Can you be authentic if you lie about what you value, believe, or feel? This brief article explores this question and the unique stances on honesty that different notions of authenticity take.

Aquinas's views about the morality of lying are well known and often discussed by commentators. But his views about the nature of lying have yet to receive the attention they deserve. In this article, I take some of the first steps necessary to correct this state of affairs by clarifying and offering a limited defense of the account of lying that Aquinas presents in in his Summa Theologiae—more specifically, in that portion of it known as the treatise on truth (Part 2-2, Questions 109–113).

In Genesis 27 Jacob is depicted as lying to Isaac. Jacob, however, was held in Christian tradition to be both a moral exemplar and to be speaking prophetically in this episode with his father. This raises the question of how Doctors of the Church such as St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas were able reconcile these interpretive commitments with their stance on the intrinsically disordered nature of lying. In examining their resolution of this tension, we discover an important exegetical distinction for interpreting troubling words as nevertheless being divinely inspired. Yet, it is only in light of another interpretive distinction, recently highlighted by Nicholas Lombardo OP, that we can both hold to the inspired nature of Jacob's words and also a natural reading of the account in Genesis 27. The detailed examination of Genesis 27 by both Augustine and Aquinas is an important case study for understanding how we can interpret troubling language as still being the word of God. This undertaking, spanning centuries between Augustine and Aquinas, is now taken one step further thanks to the exegetical proposal of Fr. Lombardo.