In an experiment involving a standard trust game and a costless signalling game, it is demonstrated that economically relevant norm-based behaviors (trust, reciprocity and truth-telling) vary with social identity. The experimental procedure induced two trivial social identities. In one version, a status difference was induced. The results permitted a succinct description of identity effects: su...

INTRODUCTION One of the ethical issues surrounding birth cohort studies is how to obtain informed assent from children as they grow up. What and how parents tell their children affects children's future choices about the study, yet few studies have focused on parents' influence on children. OBJECTIVE This study examines parents' attitudes towards telling their children about their participati...

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 cond...

A cornerstone of the task switching literature is the finding that task performance is typically slower and more error-prone when the task switches than when it repeats. So far, deception research has largely ignored that such cognitive switch costs should also emerge when switching between truth telling and lying, and may affect the cognitive cost of lying as reflected in higher prefrontal bra...

Three studies demonstrated that postsuppressional rebound (PSR) may be both reduced and enhanced by manipulating people's attributions about why they experience difficulty during suppression. Telling participants that suppression failures indicate a high motivation to use the suppressed construct produced more PSR than telling them that suppression failures indicate a low motivation to use the ...

Abstract We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate how different deliberative structures of varying inclusiveness affect collective decisions in the presence economic conflict. An electorate consists two groups, one informed and uninformed about an uncertain state economy. This affects payoffs differently for groups. study three that vary are included pre-vote communication. Compared wi...

Stories and story-telling are a cultural achievement of significant relevance, even in modern times. Since ancient times stories have served to entertain and teach mankind to “transmit” knowledge from generation to generation. Story-telling ranges from simple aural narrations to traditional inter-generational discourse and, in modern times, workflow-oriented organizational learning. Web-based s...