Time Pressure and Honesty in a Deception Game

Previous experiments have found mixed results on whether honesty is intuitive or requires deliberation. Here we add to this literature by building on prior work of Capraro (2017). We report a large study (N=1,389) manipulating time pressure vs time delay in a deception game. We find that, in this setting, people are more honest under time pressure, and that this result is not driven by confounds present in earlier work.

[1]  David G. Rand,et al.  Spontaneous giving and calculated greed , 2012, Nature.

[2]  Jason Childs.  Gender differences in lying , 2012 .

[3]  Kate A. Ratliff,et al.  Using Nonnaive Participants Can Reduce Effect Sizes , 2015, Psychological science.

[4]  J. Maule,et al.  Is intuition really cooperative? Improved tests support the social heuristics hypothesis , 2018, PloS one.

[5]  David G. Rand,et al.  Habits of Virtue: Creating Norms of Cooperation and Defection in the Laboratory , 2015, Manag. Sci..

[6]  Ben R. Newell,et al.  The average laboratory samples a population of 7,300 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers , 2015, Judgment and Decision Making.

[7]  J. K. Murnighan,et al.  Contemplation and Conversation: Subtle Influences on Moral Decision Making , 2012 .

[8]  Valerio Capraro,et al.  Gender Differences in Altruism on Mechanical Turk: Expectations and Actual Behaviour , 2016, Economics Letters.

[9]  David G. Rand,et al.  Social Heuristics and Social Roles: Intuition Favors Altruism for Women But Not for Men , 2016, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[10]  Dan Ariely,et al.  Unable to Resist Temptation: How Self-control Depletion Promotes Unethical Behavior , 2011 .

[11]  David G. Rand,et al.  The online laboratory: conducting experiments in a real labor market , 2010, ArXiv.

[12]  Anna van 't Veer,et al.  Limited capacity to lie: Cognitive load interferes with being dishonest , 2014, Judgment and Decision Making.

[13]  C. Ai,et al.  Interaction terms in logit and probit models , 2003 .

[14]  Yoella Bereby-Meyer,et al.  Honesty Requires Time (and Lack of Justifications) , 2012, Psychological science.

[15]  L. Gangadharan,et al.  Individual level evidence of dishonesty and the gender effect , 2012 .

[16]  Panagiotis G. Ipeirotis,et al.  Running Experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk , 2010, Judgment and Decision Making.

[17]  M. Johannesson,et al.  Gender differences in deception , 2008 .

[18]  Arianna Novaro,et al.  Does Telling White Lies Signal Pro-Social Preferences? , 2015, Judgment and Decision Making.

[19]  David G. Rand,et al.  Intuition, deliberation, and the evolution of cooperation , 2016, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[20]  Kai A. Konrad,et al.  Deception Under Time Pressure: Conscious Decision or a Problem of Awareness? , 2017, SSRN Electronic Journal.

[21]  Alexander W. Cappelen,et al.  When Do We Lie? , 2012 .

[22]  Non-naïvety may reduce the effect of intuition manipulations , 2018, Nature Human Behaviour.

[23]  Amar Cheema,et al.  Data collection in a flat world: the strengths and weaknesses of mechanical turk samples , 2013 .

[24]  Valerio Capraro,et al.  Does the Truth Come Naturally? Time Pressure Increases Honesty in one-shot Deception Games , 2016, 1606.04907.

[25]  W. Greene.  Testing hypotheses about interaction terms in nonlinear models , 2010 .

[26]  Sanjiv Erat,et al.  White lies , 2010, Manag. Sci..

[27]  Fiery Cushman,et al.  Deliberation erodes cooperative behavior – even towards competitive out-groups, even when using a control condition, and even when eliminating selection bias , 2017 .

[28]  Antonio A. Arechar,et al.  Conducting interactive experiments online , 2017, Experimental Economics.

[29]  David G. Rand.  Cooperation, Fast and Slow , 2016, Psychological science.

[30]  J. Abeler,et al.  Preferences for Truth-Telling , 2016, Econometrica.

[31]  David G. Rand,et al.  Social heuristics shape intuitive cooperation , 2014, Nature Communications.

[32]  Uri Gneezy,et al.  Deception: The Role of Consequences , 2005 .

[33]  V. Capraro,et al.  Rethinking spontaneous giving: Extreme time pressure and ego-depletion favor self-regarding reactions , 2016, Scientific Reports.

[34]  V. Capraro.  Gender Differences in Lying in Sender-Receiver Games: A Meta-Analysis , 2017, Judgment and Decision Making.