I Lie? We Lie! Why? Experimental Evidence on a Dishonesty Shift in Groups
通过实验室实验，研究个体在群体中决策时是否更倾向于不诚实，发现群体成员间的沟通是导致不诚实行为增加的主要原因，且与利益共享无关。
Unethical behavior such as dishonesty, cheating and corruption occurs frequently in organizations or groups. Recent experimental evidence suggests that there is a stronger inclination to behave immorally in groups than individually. We ask if this is the case, and if so, why. Using a parsimonious laboratory setup, we study how individual behavior changes when deciding as a group member. We observe a strong dishonesty shift. This shift is mainly driven by communication within groups and turns out to be independent of whether group members face payoff commonality or not (i.e., whether other group members benefit from one’s lie). Group members come up with and exchange more arguments for being dishonest than for complying with the norm of honesty. Thereby, group membership shifts the perception of the validity of the honesty norm and of its distribution in the population. Data and the online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2800 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.