Commentary: Winning a competition predicts dishonest behavior

[...]dishonesty is a pervasive problem that plagues society on both the global level (i.e., tax evasion leads to $3.1 trillion loss for governments annually; Tax Justice Network, 2011) and the local level (i.e., 32% of people are willing to lie on simple gumball tasks to increase their profit; Djawa...

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Published inFrontiers in neuroscience Vol. 11; p. 417
Main Authors Wu, Yin, Blue, Philip R, Clark, Luke
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Frontiers Research Foundation 18.07.2017
Frontiers Media S.A
Subjects
Behavior
behavioral economics
Brain research
Cheating
Cognitive ability
competition
decision making
Dishonesty
Experiments
Laboratories
Neuroscience
Neurosciences
Social behavior
Social classes
Social interaction
Tax evasion
Testosterone
British Columbia Canada
China
behavioral economics
competition
dishonesty
testosterone
decision making
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Summary:[...]dishonesty is a pervasive problem that plagues society on both the global level (i.e., tax evasion leads to $3.1 trillion loss for governments annually; Tax Justice Network, 2011) and the local level (i.e., 32% of people are willing to lie on simple gumball tasks to increase their profit; Djawadi and Fahr, 2015). Classic economic theory suggests that people behave dishonestly when the benefits of lying outweigh the costs of getting caught (Becker, 1968), whereas an abundance of research suggests that certain psychological factors, such as perceived social class, can increase one's tendency to be dishonest (Piff et al., 2012). [...]the outcome of a random lottery draw has no discernible influence on testosterone levels (Mazur and Lamb, 1980), and the tendency to attribute the success to external factors (i.e., luck and chance) buffered individuals' testosterone increases (Gonzalez-Bono et al., 1999, 2000). Given the role of testosterone in human social behavior, i.e., cheating (Lee et al., 2015), future experiments could fruitfully test the mediatory role of testosterone on dishonest behavior, which could help us to better understand the psychobiological precipitants of financial crises (Coates and Herbert, 2008) and have implications for future possibility of treating and/or preventing antisocial behavior.
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Edited by: Bernd Weber, University of Bonn, Germany
This article was submitted to Decision Neuroscience, a section of the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience
Reviewed by: Carlos Cueva, University of Alicante, Spain
ISSN:1662-4548
1662-453X
1662-453X
DOI:10.3389/fnins.2017.00417