Organised Crime Makes You Lie Hastily: Evidence from An On-Line Experiment

Abstract

We investigate experimentally whether exposure to a context plagued by organised crime violence induces people to misreport private information as an instinctive response. We implement a standard coin flipping task repeated for 30 times, and measure participants' response times to identify hasty and thoughtful types of subjects. Our findings support the hypothesis that living in a context plagued by organised crime violence induces a prevalence of hasty subjects who lie as an instinctive response. We record a higher degree of randomness in the decisions of hasty subjects compared to the thoughtful ones, indicating that exposure to a criminal context might limit individuals' ability to correctly figure out the incentives of the decision problem at hand.

Keywords: organised crime violence, hastiness, lying, mistaken choices

JEL Classification: A13, C91, D63