Cheaters, liars, or both? The Theory of Self-concept Hypocrisy.

Besides “the reason why” people act dishonestly, results in the literature conclude that there are honest individuals, maximazed dishonest ones, and people who are partially dishonest, yet do not maximize the utility of their dishonest behavior. The problem is that when people are 100% sure that they are not supervised at all, studies can only identify dishonesty at an aggregate level (but not individually), which requires a known statistical distribution of expected outcomes (inferred task), or a comparable control group where behavior is known. Here we show, as far as we know for the first time in the field, a way to identify individual dishonest behavior in inferred tasks for two different conditions: Inelastic situations in which participants have to decide between being honest or dishonest without intermediate options, but also in situations in which they can decide their level of (dis)honesty. The results have replicated previous works, but also have provided us with unprecedented information that allows us to make an innovative classification showing two new dishonest profiles: A new expected partially dishonest profile (“cheaters non-liars” individuals), and surprisingly a completely dishonest profile, not previously shown in the literature. We will explain the results within the framework of the new Theory of Self-concept Hypocrisy, that will allow us to theorize about the behavior of some of these (dis)honest profiles, and about dishonest behavior in a wider, new and innovative manner.

Speaker: David Pascual Ezama, RCC Research Fellow, Harvard Business School; Visiting Scholar at MIT Neuro Economic Lab, Sloan School of Management; Associate Professor at Complutense University of Madrid, Faculty of Economic and Business Sciences.

Sponsors: RCC.