Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/127404 
Year of Publication: 
2015
Series/Report no.: 
Discussion Paper Series No. 581
Publisher: 
University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics, Heidelberg
Abstract: 
Erat and Gneezy (2012) conduct an experiment to test whether people avoid lying in a situation where doing so would lead to a Pareto improvement. They conclude that many people exhibit such a "pure lie aversion." I argue that the experiment does not provide a reliable test for such an aversion, and that the evidence does not support the authors' conclusion. I conduct two new experiments which are explicitly designed to test for a 'pure' aversion to lying, and find no evidence for the existence of such a motivation. I discuss the implications of the findings for moral behavior and rule following more generally.
Subjects: 
Lying
Deception
Morality
Ethics
Experiments
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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