There are two conflicting perspectives regarding the relationship between profanity and dishonesty. These two forms of norm-violating behavior share common causes and are often considered to be positively related. On the other hand, however, profanity is often used to express one's genuine feelings and could therefore be negatively related to dishonesty. In three studies, we explored the relati...

AIM This paper reports a study investigating changes in the self-reported values of nursing students over the period 1983-2005 in the light of changes in student demography. BACKGROUND Nurses' values have been studied by both qualitative and survey methods over half a century. Generally idealism and altruism are said to wane as a result of professional socialisation, whilst honesty has been r...

Understanding the processes that promote signal reliability may provide important insights into the evolution of diverse signalling strategies among species. The signals that animals use to communicate must comprise mechanisms that prohibit or punish dishonesty, and social costs of dishonesty have been demonstrated for several fixed morphological signals (e.g. colour badges of birds and wasps)....

Communication depends on reliability. Yet, the existence of stable honest signalling presents an evolutionary puzzle. Why should animals signal honestly in the face of a conflict of interest? While students of animal signalling have offered several theoretical answers to this puzzle, the most widely studied model, commonly called the 'handicap principle', postulates that the costs of signals st...

We study Nash implementation by natural price-quantity mechanisms in pure exchange economies with free-disposal (Saijo et al., 1996, 1999) where agents have weak/strong intrinsic preferences for honesty (Dutta and Sen, 2012). Firstly, the Walrasian rule is shown to be non-implementable where all agents have weak (but not strong) intrinsic preferences for honesty. Secondly, the class of effi cie...