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

📝 Abstract

Whether there are gender differences 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, that benefit the liar at a cost for another person; altruistic white lies, that benefit another person at a cost for the liar; Pareto white lies, that benefit both the liar and another person. The results show that gender differences in lying significantly depend on the consequences of lying. Specifically: (i) males are significantly more likely than females to tell black lies (N=4,161); (ii) males are significantly more likely than females to tell altruistic white (N=2,940); (iii) results are inconclusive in the case of Pareto white lies (N=1,627).

💡 Analysis

Whether there are gender differences 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, that benefit the liar at a cost for another person; altruistic white lies, that benefit another person at a cost for the liar; Pareto white lies, that benefit both the liar and another person. The results show that gender differences in lying significantly depend on the consequences of lying. Specifically: (i) males are significantly more likely than females to tell black lies (N=4,161); (ii) males are significantly more likely than females to tell altruistic white (N=2,940); (iii) results are inconclusive in the case of Pareto white lies (N=1,627).

📄 Content

1

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

Valerio Capraro Middlesex University London United Kingdom V.Capraro@mdx.ac.uk

Forthcoming in Judgment and Decision Making

2 Abstract Whether there are gender differences 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, that benefit the liar at a cost for another person; altruistic white lies, that benefit another person at a cost for the liar; Pareto white lies, that benefit both the liar and another person. The results show that gender differences in lying significantly depend on the consequences of lying. Specifically: (i) males are significantly more likely than females to tell black lies (N=4,161); (ii) males are significantly more likely than females to tell altruistic white (N=2,940); (iii) results are inconclusive in the case of Pareto white lies (N=1,627).

Keywords: lying, honesty, deception, gender differences, sex differences.

3 Introduction Many economic and social interactions are characterized by asymmetric information. In these situations, people may be tempted to misreport their private information. Although standard economic theory predicts that people would lie as long as that is beneficial to themselves, empirical research in economics and psychology has shown that people do not always lie. Cases in which people act honestly abound, even when being dishonest would be beneficial to all parties involved (Erat & Gneezy, 2012; Cappelen, Sørensen & Tungodded, 2013; Biziou-van-Pol, Haenen, Novaro, Occhipinti-Liberman & Capraro, 2015).
Why do some people act honestly while others do not? Previous studies have approached this question from several angles. For example, scholars have explored the role of social and moral preferences (Biziou-van-Pol et al, 2015; Levine & Schweitzer, 2014; Levine & Schweitzer, 2015; Shalvi & de Dreu, 2014; Weisel & Shalvi, 2015), the role of incentives (Dreber & Johannesson, 2008; Erat & Gneezy, 2012; Fischbacher & Föllmi-Heusi, 2013; Gneezy, 2005; Gneezy, Kajackaite & Sobel, 2018; Mazar, Amir & Ariely, 2008; Sutter, 2009), the role of group-serving lies versus individual-serving lies (Cohen, Gunia, Kim-Jun & Murnighan, 2009; Conrads, Irlenbusch, Rilke & Walkowitz, 2013; Gino, Ayal & Ariely, 2013; Wiltermuth, 2011), and the role of manipulating cognitive resources (Gino, Schweitzer, Mead & Ariely, 2011; Shalvi, Eldar & Bereby-Meyer, 2012; Gunia et al., 2012; van’t Veer, Stel & van Beest, 2014; Capraro, 2017; Barcelo & Capraro, 2017; Lohse, Simon & Konrad, 2018). Another line of research that has received a great deal of attention is whether there are gender differences in lying. An early paper by Dreber and Johannesson (2008) found that males lie more than females, at least in the domain of black lies, that is, lies that benefit the liar at a cost

4 for another person. This result was successfully replicated in some studies (Friesen & Gangadharan, 2012; Capraro, Schulz & Rand, 2018) but not in others (Childs, 2012; Capraro & Peltola, 2018), which found no gender differences in the context of black lies. Subsequently, Erat and Gneezy (2012) observed that the sign of gender differences in lying might depend on the consequences of the lie: they found that males lie more than females in the context of Pareto white lies (lies that benefit both the liar and another person), but females lie more than males in the context of altruistic white lies (lies that benefit another person at a cost for the liar). However, the former result was not replicated by Cappelen et al (2013), who found no gender differences in the context of Pareto white lies; and the latter result was not replicated by Biziou- van-Pol et al (2015), who, in fact, found the opposite, that males tell more altruistic white lies than females. These mixed results suggest that gender differences in lying, if existent, might be small and depending on the consequences of lying. Thus, passing to a meta-analytic approach can be useful to shed light on the topic.
The contribution of this work is to do a step in this direction by analyzing a large sample of more than 8,500 observations, coming from 65 different treatment conditions, conducted by 14 different research groups, by taking also into account the consequences of lying.
Measure of honesty Researchers have developed several measures of honest behavior. For example, in Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013), participants roll a die, in private, and then report the resulting outcome knowing that they will be paid an amount equal to the number they report, unless the number is six, in which case th

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