title: Social control, social learning, and cheating: Evidence from lab and online experiments on dishonesty.
abstract: Varying the conditions of the decision-making environment we offered participants the opportunity to increase their payoff by undetectable lies. In addition to a baseline treatment, in which subjects rolled a die in private and showed a high extent of dishonest behavior, we increased the degree of social control by a novel treatment in which subjects played in randomly assigned pairs of two. The presence of others proved to substantially, but only temporarily reduce dishonest behavior. Furthermore, one treatment group received feedback on unethical behavior of participants in a similar experiment. Knowing that others betrayed in the experiment facilitated social learning and led to a higher prevalence of cheating. Finally, increasing the degree of anonymity by re-running the experiment online increased the extent of norm transgressions slightly.
authors.affiliation: Leibniz University Hanover, Schneiderberg 50, 30167 Hanover, Germany. Electronic address: m.kroher@ish.uni-hannover.de.
authors.forename: Martina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kroher
authors.affiliation: University of Mannheim, A5, 6, 68131 Mannheim, Germany. Electronic address: wolbring@uni-mannheim.de.
authors.forename: Tobias
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wolbring
mesh_terms: D008192:Deception; D003657:Decision Making / Q000941:ethics; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D009014:Morals; D000067074:Peer Influence; D018907:Privacy; D012927:Social Control, Informal; D012931:Social Environment; D000067570:Social Learning; D066262:Social Norms
keywords: Anonymity; Cheating; Decay of social norms; Deception; Experimental design; Social control; Social learning; Unethical behavior