We investigate the intrinsic motivation of individuals to report, and thereby sanction, fellow group members who lie for personal gain. We further explore the changes in lying and reporting behavior that result from giving individuals a say in who joins their group. We find that enough...

This paper reports the results of an experimental investigation which allows a deeper insight into the nature of social preferences amongst organized criminals and how these differ from "ordinary" criminals on the one hand and from the non‐criminal population in the same geographical area on...

This paper investigates the driving forces behind informal sanctions in cooperation games and the extent to which theories of fairness and reciprocity capture these forces. We find that cooperators' punishment is almost exclusively targeted towards the defectors but the latter also impose a...

The paper studies the relative effectiveness of extrinsic monetary disincentives and intrinsic non-monetary disincentives to corruption. In doing so, we also test the Beckarian prediction that at the same level of expected payoff, a low probability of detection with high penalty is a stronger...

The present paper reports the results of an experiment which studied the effects of parents' marital status (divorced or non-divorced) and psychological counseling (administered or not) on the honesty level of kindergarten children. Data on marital status and psychological counseling was...

The extensive body of survey-based research correlating between students' cheating and their academic grade point average (GPA) consistently finds a significant negative relationship between cheating and the GPA. The present paper reports the results of a two-round experiment designed to expose...

Anger is an important driver in shaping economic activities, particularly in instances that involve strategic interactions between individuals. Here we test whether anger impairs the capacity to think strategically, and we analyze the implications of our result on bargaining and cooperation...

Social media has made anonymized behavior online a prevalent part of many people's daily interactions. The implications of this new ability to hide one's identity information remain imperfectly understood. Might it be corrosive to human cooperation? This paper investigates the possibility that a...

In a laboratory experiment we test the interaction effects of status and group identity on interpersonal trust. Natural group identity is generated by school affiliation. Status (expert or agent) is awarded based on relative performance in a math quiz that is ex ante less favorable to the...

This paper provides strong evidence supporting the long-standing speculation that decision-making in groups has a dark side, by magnifying the prevalence of anti-social behavior towards outsiders. A large-scale experiment implemented in Slovakia and Uganda (N=2,309) reveals that deciding in a...