Data for: Dishonesty: From parents to children

Understanding their origins, and what mechanisms help to attenuate such acts is an underexplored area of research. This study takes an economic approach to explore the propensity of individuals to act dishonestly across different contexts.

We conduct an experiment that includes both parents and their young children as subjects, exploring the roles of moral cost and scrutiny on dishonest behavior. We find that the highest level of dishonesty occurs in settings where the parent acts alone and the dishonest act benefits the child. In this spirit, there is also an interesting, quite different, effect of children on parents’ behavior: parents act more honestly under the scrutiny of daughters than under the scrutiny of sons.