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Who do you lie to? Social identity and the cost of lying
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Who do you lie to? Social identity and the cost of lying

Author

Listed:
  • Christoph Feldhaus
  • Johannes Mans

Abstract

We investigate whether and how an individuals' propensity to lie is affected by the social relationship between a potential liar and her/his possible victim. We argue that a shared social identity of sender and receiver increases sender's aversion to lie by raising two types of costs: the allocative and the social costs of the lie. Allocative costs should be larger in ingroup interactions because social preferences are stronger and thus losses to the receiver are weighted more heavily while social costs should be higher in closer relationships due to stricter moral rules. In contrast to our hypothesis our experimental results from a modified three-person sender-receiver game do not provide evidence that social identity affects lying behavior. While across all treatments about half of the participants send a dishonest message, we do not observe differences in lying behavior towards ingroup and outgroup members: neither with respect to allocative nor in terms of social costs. Hence, in our experiment lying behavior is robust to social identity manipulations.

Suggested Citation

  • Christoph Feldhaus & Johannes Mans, 2014. "Who do you lie to? Social identity and the cost of lying," Working Paper Series in Economics 76, University of Cologne, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:kls:series:0076
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    Cited by:

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    2. Benistant, Julien & Villeval, Marie Claire, 2019. "Unethical behavior and group identity in contests," Journal of Economic Psychology, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 128-155.
    3. Lohse, Johannes & McDonald, Rebecca, 2021. "Absolute groupishness and the demand for information," VfS Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual Conference): Climate Economics 242454, Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association.
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    5. Eliana Carranza & Aletheia Donald & Florian Grosset & Supreet Kaur, 2022. "The Social Tax: Redistributive Pressure and Labor Supply," NBER Working Papers 30438, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    6. Jin Zheng & Arthur Schram & Gönül Doğan, 2021. "Friend or foe? Social ties in bribery and corruption," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 24(3), pages 854-882, September.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Private information; deception; lying costs; social identity; experiment;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C91 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Design of Experiments - - - Laboratory, Individual Behavior
    • D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design

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