Policy makers use several international indices that characterize countries according to the quality of their institutions. However, no effort has been made to study how the honesty of citizens varies across countries. This paper explores the honesty among citizens across sixteen countries with 1440 participants. We employ a very simple task where participants face a trade-off between the joy of eating a fine chocolate and the disutility of having a threatened self-concept because of lying. Despite the incentives to cheat, we find that individuals are mostly honest. Further, international indices that are indicative of institutional honesty are completely uncorrelated with citizens' honesty for our sample countries.
Keywords: Honesty, corruption, cultural differences
Pascual‐Ezama, David and Fosgaard, Toke and Cárdenas, Juan-Camilo and Kujal, Praveen and Veszteg, Robert Ferec and Gil-Gómez de Liaño, Beatriz and Gunia, Brian and Weichselbaumer, Doris and Hilken, Katharina and Antinyan, Armenak and Delnoij, Joyce and Proestakis, Antonios and Tira, Michael and Pratomo, Yulius and Pratomo, Yulius and Jaber-López, Tarek and Brañas-Garza, Pablo, Context-Dependent Cheating: Experimental Evidence from 16 Countries (March 4, 2015). Documento CEDE No. 2015-12, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2579926 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2579926
Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic
FOLLOWERS
147
PAPERS
17,898
Feedback
Feedback to SSRN
If you need immediate assistance, call 877-SSRNHelp (877 777 6435) in the United States, or +1 212 448 2500 outside of the United States, 8:30AM to 6:00PM U.S. Eastern, Monday - Friday.