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Would I lie more if I know I won’t get caught ? Modeling deceptive choices under risk and under certainty| old_uid | 9852 |
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| title | Would I lie more if I know I won’t get caught ? Modeling deceptive choices under risk and under certainty |
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| start_date | 2015/09/22 |
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| schedule | 13h-14h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | amphithéâtre |
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| summary | Standard economic theories of rational behavior posit that whenever the expected benefit from lying exceeds the outcome of being honest, a selfish individual, a ``homo economicus’’ should lie, and the decision should be determined solely by the trade-off between the gain from lying and the penalty incurred if detected. Still, not everyone lies and those who do, do not always do so, or do not do it maximally, even if it would be beneficial and there is no cost to it. If there is something to be gained by deceiving with absolutely no cost, and an individual still does not exploit the opportunity, the act of lying itself must appear as a cost to her (pure lie aversion). Alternatively, she may have extremely strong aversion to risk taking.
We studied the role of risk-attitude in the decisions to deceive for one’s own benefit, when altruism or other other-regarding considerations had no place. We chose tax return as the deception scenario because of its inherent nature of decision making under risk, and the extremely valuable feature of being usable symmetrically for the gain and loss domains, depending on whether the taxpayer is facing additional taxes or a tax refund.
In Experiment 1 we compared risky deceptive choices to pure gambles with equivalent risks and outcomes, and found relatively high degree of lie aversion ; more specifically, the participants who deceived less were more risk averse in gambles.
In Experiment 2 we asked our participants to make choices between deceptive and non-deceptive alternatives that were either risky or certain. We found much higher rate of deception if we removed either the risk or the detection penalty, than when both of these elements were present. Based on these findings we propose three factors that influence deceptive choices together with the expected monetary gain ; preference for sure options over risky, inherent cost of lying, and cost of detection (e.g., shame, distrust). |
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| responsibles | Laboissière |
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