Abstract
Personality traits matter. We could summarize with these simple words a vast
literature in social sciences dedicated to explaining the behavior of individuals,
acting alone or within societies. Examples abound in several economic contexts spanning from the intention to become a social entrepreneur (Nga and
Shamuganathan, 2010), to management of household finances (Brown and
Taylor, 2014), to labor market outcomes (Fletcher, 2013). Similarly vast is the
literature on cheating, justified by the profound economic and social consequences of such behavior.
In this chapter, we link these two growing strands of literature by studying
the relation between experimental measures of cheating behavior among adolescents and personality measures obtained through a questionnaire.
The first consistent finding from the experimental literature on cheating is
that some (not all) individuals are dishonest, i.e., when facing the opportunity to
lie in order to extract a gain (with the lie typically concerning the result of a dice
roll, or a fair coin toss), a sizable share of individual do so: that is, the proportion of individuals reporting a win usually exceeds the objective probability of
a win, while still being smaller (often considerably smaller) than one (Abeler
et al., 2018). This general result overshadows, however, a huge heterogeneity in
the observed individual cheating behavior. Most individuals are willing to cheat
only a little (Shalvi et al., 2011), some entirely refrain from lying, while others lie to the maximum possible extent (Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi, 2013).
This observed heterogeneity, coupled with the fact that individuals who cheat
in the lab tend to cheat also in the field (Cohn and Maréchal, 2016), raises the
question of which characteristics of an individual’s personality influence her
decision to lie.
As a precondition for any discussion, we all know that people care about
their self-image and struggle to preserve it (Mazar et al., 2008). This struggle
imposes a cost, of psychological nature, to the cheater, which changes according
to the context. As a matter of example, we know that the decision to lie implies
a different psychological cost when people have to report their immoral intentions before acting (Jiang, 2013), when acting dishonestly hurts (or benefit) others (e.g., Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi, 2013), when temporally distancing the
decision task from the payment of the reward (Ruffle and Tobol, 2014), when
individuals are under scrutiny (Ostermaier and Uhl, 2017; Pierce et al., 2015),
when they act alone or in groups (Kocher et al., 2018), and when they have a
potential accomplice (Barr and Michailidou, 2017).
Only recently some papers have considered the importance of personality
traits in cheating behavior. In a recent contribution, Pfattheicher et al. (2018)
use economically incentivized cheating paradigms (a dice-rolling paradigm and
a coin-toss paradigm) to show that, in line with previous literature (Hilbig and
Zettler, 2015; Kleinlogel et al., 2018), the basic personality trait of HonestyHumility from the HEXACO personality model (Ashton and Lee, 2007) is
negatively related to cheating behavior. That is, they identify a relation between
cheating and personality which goes beyond the dark personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism already studied by Jones
and Paulhus (2017)—no effect is found instead when a third-party scrutiny is
simulated by presenting the subjects with stylized watching eyes. Interestingly,
personality traits have different effects on different types of lies. Jonason et al.
(2014) show that while Machiavellianism is related to white lies, narcissism is
related to lying for self-gain, whereas psychopathy is related to telling lies for
no reason. In a companion paper, Baughman et al. (2014) show that psychopathy predicts scholastic cheating. In another recently
Lingua originale | English |
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Titolo della pubblicazione ospite | Dishonesty in Behavioral Economics |
Editor | A. Bucciol, N. Montinari |
Pagine | 53-79 |
Numero di pagine | 27 |
Stato di pubblicazione | Pubblicato - 2019 |
Keywords
- Cheating
- Children
- Dishonesty