CeDEx Seminar - Despoina Alempaki (University of Warwick)

Narratives, Actions and Impact on Dishonesty

When faced with a moral decision, people are often exposed to others’ rationales for taking one action or another. In this project, we investigate the effect of such narratives on people's decisions in moral dilemmas and how this effect differs when these actions are more or less consequential for third parties. Our focus is on narratives that people use when facing a trade-off between being honest and maximising own material payoff. In addition, we disentangle the influence of these narratives into the effect of simply suggesting an action and that of the justification provided for that action. To do so we implement two pre-registered experiments (N=4,965), where we vary: (a) impact: whether dishonesty generates smaller (LOW) or larger (HIGH) harm for another participant, and (b) information: whether, before the decision to lie or tell the truth, participants are presented with no social information, other participants' positive narratives promoting honesty, other participants' negative narratives promoting dishonesty, other participants' honest actions, or other participants' dishonest actions. We find that impact matters: narratives have a large positive influence on truth-telling, but only in the HIGH treatments. The effect is driven both by the justification itself and the signal of an honest action. Surprisingly, negative narratives do not promote deception. To explain the observed effects, we propose a model where deviating from the injunctive norm of truth-telling is costlier as the consequences of the immoral action increase.