Gender differences in lying in sender-receiver games: a meta-analysis

Whether there are gender di erences in lying has been largely debated in the past decade. Previous studies found mixed results. To shed light on this topic, here I report a meta-analysis of 8,728 distinct observations, collected in 65 Sender-Receiver game treatments, by 14 research groups. Following previous work and theoretical considerations, I distinguish three types of lies: black lies, which benefit the liar at a cost for another person; altruistic white lies, which benefit another person at a cost for the liar; and Pareto white lies, which benefit both the liar and another person. The results show that: males are significantly more likely than females to tell black lies (N=4,173); males are significantly more likely than females to tell altruistic white (N=2,940); and results are inconclusive in the case of Pareto white lies (N=1,615). Furthermore, gender di erences in telling altruistic white lies are significantly stronger than in the other two cases

Does the truth come naturally? Time pressure increases honesty in one-shot deception games

Many situations require people to act quickly and are characterized by asymmetric information. Since asymmetric information makes people tempted to misreport their private information for their own benefit, it is of primary importance to understand whether time pressure affects honest behavior. A theory of social heuristics (the Social Heuristics Hypothesis, SHH), predicts that, in case of one-shot interactions, such an effect exists and it is positive. The SHH proposes that when people have no time to evaluate all available alternatives, they tend to rely on heuristics, choices that are optimal in everyday, repeated interactions and that have been internalized over time; and then, after deliberation, people shift their behavior towards the one that is optimal in the given interaction. Thus, the SHH predicts that time pressure increases honesty in one-shot interactions (because honesty may be optimal in repeated interactions, while dishonesty is always optimal in the short run). However, to the best of our knowledge, no experimental studies have tested this prediction. Here, I report a large (N=1,013) study aimed at filling this gap. In this study, participants were given a private information and were asked to report it within 5 seconds vs after 30 seconds. The interaction was one-shot, and payoffs were such that subjects had an incentive to lie. As predicted by the SHH, I find that time pressure increases honest behavior. In doing so, these results provide new insights on the role of time pressure on honesty, and provide one more piece of evidence in support of the Social Heuristics Hypothesis

Gender differences in the trade-off between objective equality and efficiency

Gender differences in human behaviour have attracted generations of social scientists, who have explored whether males and females act differently in domains involving competition, risk taking, cooperation, altruism, honesty, as well as many others. Yet, little is known about gender differences in the equity-efficiency trade-off. It has been suggested that females are more equitable than males, but the empirical evidence is weak and inconclusive. This gap is particularly important, because people in power of redistributing resources often face a conflict between equity and efficiency, to the point that this trade-off has been named as “the central problem in distributive justice”. The recently introduced Trade-Off Game (TOG) – in which a decision-maker has to unilaterally choose between being equitable or being efficient – offers a unique opportunity to fill this gap. To this end, I analyse gender differences on a large dataset including all N=5,056 TOG decisions collected by my research group since we introduced this game. The results show that females prefer equity over efficiency to a greater extent than males do. These findings suggest that males and females have different preferences for resource distribution, and point to new avenues for future research

Gender differences in moral judgment and the evaluation of gender-specified moral agents

Whether, and if so, how exactly gender differences are manifested in moral judgment has recently been at the center of much research on moral decision making. Previous research suggests that women are more deontological than men in personal, but not impersonal, moral dilemmas. However, typical personal and impersonal moral dilemmas differ along two dimensions: personal dilemmas are more emotionally salient than impersonal ones and involve a violation of Kant’s practical imperative that humans must never be used as a mere means, but only as ends. Thus, it remains unclear whether the reported gender difference is due to emotional salience or to the violation of the practical imperative. To answer this question, we explore gender differences in three moral dilemmas: a typical personal dilemma, a typical impersonal dilemma, and an intermediate dilemma, which is not as emotionally salient as typical personal moral dilemmas, but contains an equally strong violation of Kant’s practical imperative. While we replicate the result that women tend to embrace deontological ethics more than men in personal, but not impersonal, dilemmas, we find no gender differences in the intermediate situation. This suggests that gender differences in these type of dilemmas are driven by emotional salience, and not by the violation of the practical imperative. Additionally, we also explore whether people think that women should behave differently than men in these dilemmas. Across all three dilemmas, we find no statistically significant differences about how people think men and women should behave

Doing good vs. avoiding bad in prosocial choice: a refined test and extension of the morality preference hypothesis

Prosociality is fundamental to human social life, and, accordingly, much research has attempted to explain human prosocial behavior. Capraro and Rand (Judgment and Decision Making, 13, 99-111, 2018) recently provided experimental evidence that prosociality in anonymous, one-shot interactions (such as Prisoner’s Dilemma and Dictator Game experiments) is not driven by outcome-based social preferences – as classically assumed – but by a generalized morality preference for “doing the right thing”. Here we argue that the key experiments reported in Capraro and Rand (2018) comprise prominent methodological confounds and open questions that bear on influential psychological theory. Specifically, their design confounds: (i) preferences for efficiency with self-interest; and (ii) preferences for action with preferences for morality. Furthermore, their design fails to dissociate the preference to do “good” from the preference to avoid doing “bad”. We thus designed and conducted a preregistered, refined and extended test of the morality preference hypothesis (N=801). Consistent with this hypothesis, our findings indicate that prosociality in the anonymous, one-shot Dictator Game is driven by preferences for doing the morally right thing. Inconsistent with influential psychological theory, however, our results suggest the preference to do “good” was as potent as the preference to avoid doing “bad” in this case

To know or not to know? Looking at payoffs signals selfish behavior, but it does not actually mean so

Costs and benefits of everyday actions are often not known beforehand. In such situations, people can either make a choice “without looking” at the payoffs, or they can “look” and learn the exact payoffs involved before making the actual choice. Recent studies suggest that the mere act of looking at payoffs will be met with distrust by observers: “lookers” are both less trustworthy and perceived to be less trustworthy than “non-lookers”. Here we extend this line of work by changing the measure of pro-sociality: instead of trustworthiness, we consider altruism. Does “looking at payoffs” signal self-regarding preferences? Do observers’ beliefs match decision makers’ actions? Two experiments demonstrate that: (i) the level of altruism among “lookers” is not different from the level of altruism among “non-lookers”, but (ii) “lookers” are perceived to be less altruistic than “non-lookers”. These results hold both when the measure of altruism is the choice whether to help or not in the so-called “envelope game” (Experiment 1) or when the measure of altruism is the donation in a standard Dictator Game (Experiment 2). In sum, these results uncover a perception gap according to which looking at payoffs signals selfish behavior, but it does not actually mean so

Social setting, intuition, and experience in lab experiments interact to shape cooperative decision-making

Recent studies suggest that cooperative decision-making in one-shot interactions is a history-dependent dynamic process: promoting intuition versus deliberation has typically a positive effect on cooperation (dynamism) among people living in a coop- erative setting and with no previous experience in economic games on cooperation (history-dependence). Here we report on a lab experiment exploring how these findings transfer to a non-cooperative setting. We find two major results: (i) promoting intuition versus deliberation has no effect on cooperative behavior among inexperienced subjects living in a non-cooperative setting; (ii) experienced subjects cooperate more than inexperienced subjects, but only under time pressure. These results suggest that cooperation is a learning process, rather than an instinctive impulse or a self-controlled choice, and that experience operates primarily via the channel of intuition. In doing so, our findings shed further light on the cognitive basis of human cooperative decision-making and provide further support for the recently proposed Social Heuristics Hypothesis

Liking but devaluing animals: emotional and deliberative paths to speciesism

We explore whether priming emotion versus deliberation affects speciesism—the tendency to prioritize certain individuals over others on the basis of their species-membership (three main and two supplementary studies; four pre-registered; N = 3,288). We find that the tendency to prioritize humans over animals (anthropocentric speciesism) decreases when participants were asked to think emotionally compared to deliberately. In contrast, the tendency to prioritize dogs over other animals (pet speciesism) increases when participants were asked to think emotionally compared to deliberately. We hypothesize that, emotionally, people like animals in general, and dogs in particular; however, deliberatively, people attribute higher moral status to humans than animals, and roughly equal status to dogs, chimpanzees, elephants and pigs. In support of this explanation, participants tended to discriminate between animals based on likability when thinking emotionally and based on moral status when thinking deliberately. These findings shed light on the psychological underpinnings of speciesism