From MIT's Technology Review, Jan. 9:
A crowdsourced psychology experiment reveals that when it comes to dishonesty, there are three kinds of people.
Everybody is familiar with the sense of shock and betrayal at having
been lied to. At the same time, people are familiar with the temptation
to lie to benefit themselves. Many will have done so.
And that raises an interesting question—given the chance to lie for
their own benefit, which people will take the opportunity? What
percentage always tell the truth regardless of how much is at stake?
And what percentage always lie to maximize their gain?
Psychologists also want to know whether these behaviors are
intuitive. Are we hard-wired to lie or tell the truth? The answer has
important implications for our understanding of human nature and our
efforts to encourage or discourage certain behaviors in society.
Today we get some insight into these questions thanks to the work of
Hélène Barcelo at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in
Berkeley and Valerio Capraro at the Middlesex University Business School
in London. They have devised a clever way to test our inherent veracity
and say their data suggest that humans fall into three categories: the
good, the bad, and the angry.
At the simplest level, deciding whether to lie is a binary
problem—either we tell the truth or we don’t. Psychologists have devised
numerous experiments that explore this scenario.
But in the real world, the decision is usually more complex. It
involves a calculation to determine the benefit we can gain from lying
but also the punishment it might engender, and whether the potential
benefit outweighs the potential loss.
Psychologists have devised ways to test this, too, by offering
people lots of different ways to lie so that they must calculate which
one benefits them the most.
But no experiment tests all these factors at the same time. Until
now. Barcelo and Capraro have devised an ingenious experiment that
tempts people to lie and also gives them the opportunity lie in
different ways that change the benefit to them.
The experiment is an online test for workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
crowdsourcing website, available to many different people. “By looking
at the distribution of choices, we can divide people in types according
to the strategy they implement,” say Barcelo and Capraro....MUCH MORE
