SER - External Research Seminar
MARCO PIOVESAN (Harvard Business School)
Honesty, Hypocrisy and the Context
Date: October 24, 2 pm Place: Salle F, Ecully
Presenter and author: Marco Piovesan Affiliation: Harvard Business School Title: Honesty, Hypocrisy and the Context
Long Abstract:
In the first experiment, we study the relationship between honesty, age and self-‐control. We focus on children aged between 5 and 15 as the literature suggests that self-‐control develops within such age range. We ask each child to toss a fair coin in private and to record the outcome (white or black) on a paper sheet. We only reward children who report white. Although we are unable to tell whether each child was honest or not, we speculate about the proportion of reported white outcomes. Children report the prize-‐winning outcome at rates statistically above 50% but below 100%. Moreover, the probability of cheating is uniform across groups based on child’s characteristics, in particular age. In a second treatment we explicitly tell children not to cheat. This request has a dampening effect on their tendency to over-‐report the prize-‐winning outcome, especially in girls. Furthermore, while this effect in boys is constant with age, in girls it tends to decrease with age.
In the second experiment we connect our research on cheating with the research on the evolution of social preferences. Previous research in fact suggests that humans develop an increasing concern with norms of fairness over the course of childhood. However, adults frequently engage in moral hypocrisy, attempting to appear fair without actually being fair. We explore whether children truly begin to behave more fairly towards others as argued in previous research or instead merely learn to appear fair while continuing to behave selfishly. We use a paradigm in which children (ages 6 to 11 years) had the opportunity to choose a fair procedure (i.e., flipping a coin) to assign attractive and boring prizes to themselves and others, but could then lie by reporting the outcome that would give them the preferable prize. We find evidence of increased moral hypocrisy, but not actual morality. While younger children tended to choose the attractive prize right away (i.e., the selfish option) without flipping the coin, older children were much more likely to flip the coin – yet continued to assign themselves to the attractive prize.
In the third experiment, our participants were adults and not children in the previous studies.
But children were in some sense involved: we run an experiment in which parents of young children participated in the usual coin toss task; according to different treatments we varied whether their child was in the room with them during the coin toss. We also varied whether the prize they could win was for the parent or for the child. The resulting 2x2 design allows us to investigate how the presence of a child changes the behavior of parents. Our results show that parents are willing to cheat more when they are alone and the prize is for their children.
