Does telling white lies signal pro-social preferences?

Abstract

Este artículo analiza el conflicto moral que surge cuando las personas tienen la oportunidad de decir una mentira piadosa, entendida como una mentira que beneficia a otra persona. A través de un experimento en dos etapas, los autores investigan qué revela este comportamiento sobre las preferencias prosociales de los individuos. En la primera etapa se mide la aversión a mentir mediante un juego de engaño que distingue entre mentiras piadosas paretianas y mentiras piadosas altruistas. En la segunda etapa se evalúan las tendencias altruistas y cooperativas utilizando el Juego del Dictador y el Dilema del Prisionero. Los resultados muestran que el altruismo y la cooperación se correlacionan positivamente con la aversión a mentir en el caso de las mentiras paretianas, pero negativamente en el caso de las mentiras altruistas. Asimismo, se observan diferencias de género en la propensión a mentir de forma altruista.

The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one pushing towards telling the truth always and the other pushing towards helping others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What does telling a white lie signal about a person’s pro-social tendencies? To answer this question, we conducted a two-stage 2x2 experiment. In the first stage, we used a Deception Game to measure aversion to telling a Pareto white lie (i.e., a lie that helps both the liar and the listener), and aversion to telling an altruistic white lie (i.e., a lie that helps the listener at the expense of the liar). In the second stage we measured altruistic tendencies using a Dictator Game and cooperative tendencies using a Prisoner’s dilemma. We found three major results: (i) both altruism and cooperation are positively correlated with aversion to telling a Pareto white lie; (ii) both altruism and cooperation are negatively correlated with aversion to telling an altruistic white lie; (iii) men are more likely than women to tell an altruistic white lie, but not to tell a Pareto white lie. Our results shed light on the moral conflict between prosociality and truth-telling. In particular, the first finding suggests that a significant proportion of people have non-distributional notions of what the right thing to do is, irrespective of the economic consequences, they tell the truth, they cooperate, they share their money.