Transcript – Understanding the Motivations for Cheating and Lying Using Laboratory Experiments

Understanding the motivations for cheating and lying is a collaborative project between the Department of Economics and Agricultural Economics. Cheating and lying are pervasive phenomena with huge cost to society, not only from the act of cheating itself, but also because of the large cost associated with the implementation of measures to enforce and punish cheating. The main motivation of our work is to understand the monetary and also the moral motivations for honest behavior to help US design institutions that may effectively reduce the propensity to cheat as an alternative to costly monitoring and enforcement measures. So far, we have done a couple of experiments inside the lab and also in the field. We’re currently working on integrating neurophysiological measures to cheating experiments to better understand the motivations for cheating under a different context and incentive structures. The real-world implications of this work are very wide. Different nodules can be potentially applied, for example, to make sure that everybody contributes to the coffee jar fund or to reduce misuse of office supplies or to reduce reporting of income taxes.