Do Individuals Successfully Cover up Their Lies? On average, subjects are perceived as more truthful if they deceive, also happens for those with a genuine dishonest appearance

Do Individuals Successfully Cover up Their Lies? Evidence from a Compliance Experiment. Nadja Dwenger, Tim Lohse. Journal of Economic Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joep.2018.08.007

Highlights
•    We investigate how well subjects in a face-to-face situation can delude others.
•    Videotaped honest and dishonest income reports of the same subject are assessed.
•    On average, subjects are perceived as more truthful if they deceive.
•    In particular, this holds true for those with a genuine dishonest appearance.
•    However, a subject appears less truthful if she was caught lying right before.

Abstract: We study how well individuals in a face-to-face situation can delude others. We exploit data from a laboratory experiment in which participants were asked to assess video-taped statements as being rather truthful or untruthful. The statements are face-to-face tax declarations. The video clips feature each subject twice making the same declaration: One time the subject is reporting honestly, and the other time willingly dishonestly. This allows us to investigate within-subject differences in perceived truthfulness. Our study provides several novel insights. We find that individuals can cover up their lies successfully. On average, a subject is perceived as more truthful if she deceives than if she reports honestly. In particular, individuals with a genuine dishonest appearance manage to increase their perceived truthfulness by up to 14 percent when lying. Moreover, our results show that a subject appears less truthful if she had previously been caught lying. Being detected as a liar previously appears to impair self-confidence and to thereby lower an individual’s ability to deceive.