Despoina Alempaki (former NIBS1 PhD student) was invited to present her research, "Deception and Reciprocity" at LISER, Luxembourg in February 2018. 

This research (which acknowledges both NIBS1 and NIBS2 support) was written in September 2016 and published as an SSRN working paper (with recent revisions in November 2018).

Abstract

We experimentally investigate the relationship between (un)kind actions and subsequent deception in a two-player, two-stage game. The first stage involves a dictator game. In the second-stage, the recipient in the dictator game has the opportunity to lie to her counterpart. We study how the fairness of dictator-game outcomes affects subsequent lying decisions where lying hurts one’s counterpart. In doing so, we examine whether the moral cost of lying varies when retaliating against unkind actions is financially beneficial for the self (selfish lies), as opposed to being costly (spiteful lies). We find evidence that individuals engage in deception to reciprocate unkind behavior: The smaller the payoff received in the first stage, the higher the lying rate. Intention-based reciprocity largely drives behavior, as individuals use deception to punish unkind behavior and truth-telling to reward kind behavior. For selfish lies, individuals have a moral cost of lying. However, for spiteful lies, we find no evidence for such costs. Taken together, our data show a moral cost of lying that is not fixed but instead context-dependent.

Authors

Despoina Alempaki University of Warwick, Gönül Doğan University of Cologne, and Silvia Saccardo Carnegie Mellon University.