Does telling white lies signal pro-social preferences?

TL;DR

This study investigates how people's willingness to tell white lies relates to their pro-social preferences, revealing that aversion to lying correlates with altruism and cooperation, with gender differences influencing the type of white lies told.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence linking white lie aversion to pro-social behaviors and explores gender differences in white lie-telling, advancing understanding of moral decision-making.

Findings

Aversion to Pareto white lies correlates positively with altruism and cooperation.

Aversion to altruistic white lies correlates negatively with altruism and cooperation.

Men are more likely than women to tell altruistic white lies.

Abstract

The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one pushing towards telling always the truth and the other pushing towards helping others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What does telling a white lie signal about a person's pro-social tendencies? To answer this question, we conducted a two-stage 2x2 experiment. In the first stage, we used a Deception Game to measure aversion to telling a Pareto white lie (i.e., a lie that helps both the liar and the listener), and aversion to telling an altruistic white lie (i.e., a lie that helps the listener at the expense of the liar). In the second stage we measured altruistic tendencies using a Dictator Game and cooperative tendencies using a Prisoner's dilemma. We found three major results: (i) both altruism and cooperation are positively correlated with aversion to telling a Pareto white lie; (ii) both altruism and cooperation are negatively correlated with aversion to telling an altruistic white lie; (iii) men are more likely than women to tell an altruistic white lie, but not to tell a Pareto white lie. Our results shed light on the moral conflit between pro-sociality and truth-telling. In particular, the first finding suggests that a significant proportion of people have non-distributional notions of what the right thing to do is: irrespective of their economic consequences, they tell the truth, they cooperate, they share their money.