| Summary: | 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 the
truth always 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 conflict between prosociality 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 the economic consequences, they tell the truth, they
cooperate, they share their money.
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