(Dis)honesty in individual and collaborative settings A behavioral ethics approach

This dissertation examines several key factors that shape the decision to be honest or profitable, but dishonest. The first two empirical chapters focus on individual settings, and the last two on collaborative settings.
Chapter 2 shows that people make more self-serving “mistakes” to avoid losses than to secure equal-sized gains, and that tempting information attracts more attention than non-tempting information, shaping these “mistakes”. Chapter 3 shows that people engage in other-helping lies often, after fair, unfair, and no prior treatment. Other-harming lies, however, are much less common, and occur only after unfair treatment.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on collaborative settings, where in order to collaborate with partners, people are required to lie. Chapter 4 examines how people choose their partners in these settings, revealing that both dishonest and honest people choose dishonest partners. Naturally, dishonest people seek a “partners in crime”, that will help them to maximize profits. Honest people engaged in “ethical free riding”: they refrain from lying, but also from leaving dishonest partners. Thus, honest people benefit from both worlds—they maintained their moral self-image, while profiting from their partner’s lies. Chapter 5 presents the first meta-study on collaborative (dis)honesty, revealing that partners’ lies are correlated, lies increase over time and when the financial incentive to lie increases. Additionally, compared to equivalent individual settings, people lie more in collaborative setting.
Finally, the dissertation concludes with a general discussion that puts these findings in a bigger context, and proposes avenues for future research.