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Clever enough to tell the truth

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Bradley J. Ruffle Open the ORCID record for Bradley J. Ruffle [Opens in a new window]  and
Yossef Tobol
Bradley J. Ruffle*
Affiliation:
Department of Economics, Wilfrid Laurier University, N2L 3C5 Waterloo, ON, Canada
Yossef Tobol
Affiliation:
School of Management, Jerusalem College of Technology, 91160 Jerusalem, Israel IZA, Bonn, Germany
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

We conduct a field experiment on 427 Israeli soldiers who each rolled a six-sided die in private and reported the outcome. For every point reported, the soldier received an additional half-hour early release from the army base on Thursday afternoon. We find that the higher a soldier’s military entrance score, the more honest he is on average. We replicate this finding on a sample of 156 civilians paid in cash for their die reports. Furthermore, the civilian experiments reveal that two measures of cognitive ability predict honesty, whereas general self-report honesty questions and a consistency check among them are of no value. We provide a rationale for the relationship between cognitive ability and honesty and discuss its generalizability.

Keywords

HonestyCognitive abilitySoldiersHigh non-monetary stakesC93M51
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , March 2017 , pp. 130 - 155
Copyright
Copyright © 2016 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-016-9479-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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