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Dishonesty and charitable behavior
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
Abstract
We examine in the laboratory how having the opportunity to donate to a charity in the future affects the likelihood of engaging in dishonest behavior in the present. We also examine how charitable donations are affected by past ethical choices. First, subjects self-report their performance on a task, which provides them with an opportunity for undetected cheating. In the second stage they can donate some of the money earned in the first stage to a charity. Only subjects in the treatment group know about the opportunity to donate in the second stage. We find that more subjects cheat if they know they can donate some of the money to charity. We also find that subjects in treatment end up donating less to charity and that both honest and dishonest subjects donate less in treatment. We propose a new hypothesis that explains these results: past violations of social norms numb one’s conscience, leading to more antisocial behavior.
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- Copyright © 2014 Economic Science Association
Footnotes
Electronic Supplementary Material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-014-9391-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
We are grateful to the editor and two anonymous referees for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions. We benefited from discussions with Dan Ariely, Michael Bailey, Doug Bernheim, Jed DeVaro, Dan Fragiadakis, Martin Gervais, Asen Ivanov, Uzma Khan, Muriel Niederle, Jonathan Meer, Tomás Rodriguez Barraquer, Roberto Weber, and Nicolas Ziebarth. We would like to also thank participants at the University of Iowa, California State University, East Bay, Bay Area Behavioral and Experimental Economics workshops as well as the ESA meetings in New York and Tucson, the ESA European conference in Cologne, the WEAI conference in San Francisco and the SEA conference in New Orleans for their helpful comments. We would also like to acknowledge the financial support we received from California State University, East Bay. All errors are ours.
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