Colour-dependent dishonesty in a game of chance.

We report an odd result of a coin-flip experiment which incentivises dishonest behaviour. Participants of two treatments were asked to flip a coin in private, of which one side was WHITE and the other side BLACK, and report the colour shown by the coin. Payoff depended on the reported colour: in one treatment WHITE was the more profitable outcome whereas in the other treatment BLACK was more profitable. Surprisingly, the magnitude of cheating, as reflected by the difference between the frequency of reporting the more profitable colour and its statistical expectation (50%) was not, more or less, the same in both treatments. Rather, significantly more participants cheated when BLACK was the profitable outcome. This result reappeared in two variants of the coin-flip task. We suggest that a sense of entitlement triggered by a WHITE outcome may explain this behaviour.

Collective Punishment and Cheating in the Die-Under-the-Cup Task.

A popular tool in the experimental research on dishonest behavior is the die-under-the-cup (DUTC) task in which subjects roll a die in private and report the outcome to the experimenter after being promised a payoff which increases with the die's outcome. The present paper reports the results of incorporating collective punishment into the DUTC task. We ran two experiments, each involving two rounds of the task performed in a computer lab. Despite being asked not to cheat, the average reported outcome in the first round exceeded the statistical expectancy of 3.5. The second round of the first experiment involved the threat that if this happened again, each subject would be fined by the difference between the average reported outcome and 3.5. Nevertheless, the average reported outcome in the second round significantly exceeded that of the first round. Running a second experiment, this time without the punishment threat, we ruled out the possibility that the increased cheating in the second round of the first experiment was due to a feedback effect, concluding that the threat of collective punishment acted to encourage cheating rather than helped deterring it.

Dishonesty and mandatory mask wearing in the COVID-19 pandemic.

In an attempt to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, an increasing number of countries, including Israel, have made wearing masks mandatory for their citizens not just in close public places but also while waking in the streets. Failing to comply with this regulation entails a fine enforced by the police. Still, while many passersby do wear a mask that covers both their mouth and nose, others wear a mask improperly around their chin or neck or walk the streets wearing no mask at all. We speculate that the former passersby prepare themselves for a possible encounter with a police officer, in which case they could lie and claim that their mask unnoticeably slipped down from its proper position. The present paper reports the results of a field experiment designed to examine the hypothesis that, given the opportunity, passersby who wear their mask around their chin or neck are more likely to lie than those who wear no mask at all, although intuition may suggest otherwise. Incentivizing passersby's dishonesty with the Die-Under-the-Cup (DUCT) task, the experiment results support our hypothesis.