These lab experiments allowed us to directly observe students’lying behavior and revealed signi…cant di¤erences. The sample included only …rst-year students who had not been ex-posed to intensive speci…c training. Thus, the observed lying behavior can be related to the motives that prompted them to choose their future profession in the …rst place. Un-fortunately, our experiment does not allow us to say much about what these motives may be.
To complement the analysis, we asked the survey institute OpinionWay to provide a report on how the general public of France perceives the lying behavior of the two groups of students. To keep the complexity and number of questions relatively low, in the survey, we focused on the polar cases of sel…sh black lies and altruistic white lies (Pareto white lies were omitted). Four speci…c questions were included in the omnibus weekly survey. Data collection was carried out on July 2nd, 2020. The sample of 1056 respondents is representative of the French population of 18 years or more.20 In total, 2% of polled persons did not answer our questions, which yields 1035 valid answers. Respondents received a …xed reward or could opt for a gift to the charity of their choice.
The questions are as follows:
than women do, see: Gill et al., 2013; Conrads et al., 2013; Dreber and Johannesson, 2008; Erat and Gneezy, 2012; Kleinknecht, 2019.
2 0 Segmentation criteria are age, gender, socioprofessional category, type of residency and region. The
"You consider an exchange of information between a person who sends a message and a person who receives it. In this exchange, the sender of the message can either tell the truth, i.e., convey exact information, or lie, i.e., convey false information. Academic research has de…ned two types of important lies: a "black lie", which entails positive consequences for the liar and negative consequences for the receiver of the misleading message; these lies are bene…cial to the liar at the expense of the receiver; and a "white lie", which brings a bene…t to the person who receives it, and is costly to the person who tells it.
Please indicate whether you agree or disagree with the following four statements:
S1. An undergraduate student in medicine is more prone to tell black lies than an under-graduate student in business administration
S2. An undergraduate student in medicine is more prone to tell white lies than an un-dergraduate student in business administration
S3. In general, the use of black lies is more frequent in the business world than in the the medical world
S4. In general, the use of white lies is more frequent in the business world than in the medical world
The answers were recorded on a seven-item scale, from 1 (full disagreement) to 7 (full agreement), 4 being the neutral case.
The …rst two items (S1 and S2) are directly related to the experiment. They aim to gauge how the general population perceives the lying behavior of the two groups of students.
Items 3 and 4 aim to capture the general opinion on deception within the business pro-fession and the medical propro-fession.
In the implementation of the survey, items 1 and 2 were alternated, as were items 3 and 4.
Table 10 presents the synthesis of the results that consolidates all a¢ rmative (5 to 7), and all negative (1 to 3) answers (the seven-category distribution is presented in Appendix Table 13). The last column presents the output of a z-test for one proportion of the nonneutral observations.
At least slight disagreement Neutral At least slight agreement
S1 36.3% 53.9% 9.8% p<0.001
S2 23.0% 54.4% 22.7% p=0.890
S3 15.2% 41.0% 43.8% p<0.001
S4 36.4% 44.2% 19.4% p<0.001
Table 10: Opinions on lying di¤erences
In the experiment, there was no di¤erence between the two groups of students with respect to prosocial lies. In the survey, a majority of the respondents (53.9%) chose the neutral answer, and equal proportions of respondents agree and disagree with the statement that students in medicine are more prone than students in business to tell white lies.
However, only a small number of respondents (9.8%) agreed that medical students are more tempted to tell sel…sh lies, compared to 36.3% who disagreed. This skewed distribution of the opinions is in line with the results of the experiment showing that, on average, business students tell sel…sh lies more often than medical students.
With respect to their opinion on the use of the two types of lies in the two professions, the respondents consider that sel…sh lies are more frequent in the business world than in the medical sector (43.8% agree while only 15.2% disagree); the opinions reverse for the case of white lies (36.4% disagree while 19.4% agree). According to these "folk beliefs", the business profession in general provides a more fertile ground for sel…sh lies; on the other hand, the medical profession provides a more supportive environment for white lies.
Schneider et al. (2020) have shown that immoral work attracts those workers least concerned with acting morally, which in turn can deteriorate the moral standards of some
professions. This could be a possible explanation for why students of a given lying pattern self-select into one of the two professions: if people in general believe that, for example, in the business world sel…sh lies are the norm, those with a taste for sel…sh lies may be likely to choose that profession. Furthermore, if people with a taste for sel…sh lies self-select into the business profession, over time, this profession will comprise more people of this type than the medical profession, which validates the beliefs of the general public. This set of beliefs and actual profession choices can be de…ned as self-ful…lling prophecies (Nash Bayesian equilibrium).
5 Conclusion
In the last …fteen years, the literature in experimental economics on lies and deception has expanded at a steady pace. This paper analyzes the di¤erences in lying behavior between two groups of subjects exposed to di¤erent professional norms, expectations and stereotypes, namely, business and medical students.
In the world of business, many professionals …nd it legitimate to exploit any trading opportunity, including a would-be informational advantage. Economists like to believe that strong competition among …rms rules out systematic rent extraction but are relatively silent about the ethical consequences of trading with a player who has market power. However, lying in negotiations, with sellers exaggerating costs and buyers understating their willingness to pay, is a common practice. For many trading people, a "good" deal is one in which one party obtains most of the surplus from trade at the expense of the other and sometimes in sheer disregard of the interest of the other. In contrast, centuries of medical practice throughout history reveal that physicians seldom exploit their informational advantage and act in the interest of the patients even at personal cost. Such behavior is grounded in the professional norms inspired by the Hippocratic oath, according to which the interest
of the patient should always prevail. In turn, these professional norms should attract the most pro-social persons to this …eld. Sel…sh lies are not tolerated, while some white lies, such as prescribing a placebo or hiding very bad news, could be common. Of course, these stereotypes have their own exceptions in both worlds. In the health sector in particular, con‡icts of interest and the hiding of medical errors have sometimes been revealed.
The experiment presented in this paper allowed us to directly observe the lying behavior of the respective groups. We used the classic sender-receiver deception game by Erat and Gneezy (2012) to determine and assess the importance of those behavioral di¤erences. The complementary giving-to-charity task did not reveal any substantial di¤erence in altruism between the two groups; however, business students present a higher risk tolerance.
Turning to the strategic communication issue, it turns out that students of both pro…les respond to incentives, as documented in Gneezy (2005) and Erat and Gneezy (2012). How-ever, while many students lie, a nonnegligible share of both medicine and business students refuse to tell even a Pareto white lie, which would deliver signi…cant gains to both parties.
The propensity to tell white lies was similar between the two groups. On the other hand, medical students appear to be signi…cantly more reluctant than business students to tell self-ish lies, a result that holds when controlling for altruism and risk aversion. Medical students exhibit a higher concern that their partner will be harmed by misleading communication.
The fact that both types of students behave in the same way in terms of telling white lies but di¤er with respect to sel…sh lies is troubling. If moral people just dislike lying, regardless of the consequences for others, then there should be no di¤erences between the two groups for both types of lies. The results point to some di¤erences in student’s perceptions of how harmful or legitimate the use of sel…sh lies can be, with business students telling sel…sh lies more easily than medical students.
A representative survey of the French population, conducted in July 2020 byOpinionWay for the purpose of this paper, revealed that the general public of France expects sel…sh lies to be more frequent in the business sector than in the medical sector, the opposite holding for white lies. The general public tends to believe that the frequency of sel…sh liars is higher among business students than among medical students. These results match the behavior observed in the experiment, and might suggest one among many possible explanations of why young people self-select for a given profession. If telling sel…sh lies is the norm in the business world but not in medicine, students with a taste for sel…sh lies would enroll in business studies, and those who are more averse to sel…sh lies would enroll in medicine.
It is very di¢ cult to draw any moral criticism or lesson from the evidence provided in this paper since each profession has its own communication norms. However, from a method-ological point of view, it is important to keep in mind that results obtained from samples of students in business and economics, which are the main groups of the public considered in economics lab experiments, might not be representative of the deception behavior of the general population. To strengthen the external validity of these studies, it might be useful to perform replication studies of the main deception experiments on di¤erent types of subjects.
Acknowledgement 1 This research was funded by academic grants provided by the Direc-tion de la Recherche, InternaDirec-tional, ValorizaDirec-tion et Ecoles doctorales (DRIVE) of the Uni-versity of Paris Descartes and the LABEX MME DII of the UniUni-versity of Cergy Pontoise.
It bene…ted from the agreement of the Ethical Committee of University of Paris Descartes on April 18, 2019. The authors are grateful to Delphine Dubart, at the ESSEC Experimen-tal Lab, for her technical assistance, as well to Thierry Aimar, Nathalie Charnaux, Cécile Badoual, Jeanne Bregier, Philippe Henry, Fabrice Jollant, Marie-France Mamzer, Sophie Ng Wing Tin, and Jean Ralph Zahar for their support during the di¤ erent implementation stages of the experiment. They would like to thank Angela Sutan and Eli Spiegelman for their suggestions and remarks on an early version of the paper.
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