Disentangling dishonesty: An empirical investigation of the nature of lying and cheating.

Abstract

When people lie, they knowingly misrepresent factual information. When people cheat, they create fraudulent information. Though these two types of unethical behavior are distinct, behavioral ethics scholarship has conflated lying with cheating. The canonical experimental paradigms used in behavioral ethics assess lying behavior. They do not assess cheating behavior. Scholars, however, have used findings from studies of lying to develop theories about cheating. This approach has limited our understanding of unethical behavior. Across one pilot study and 14 preregistered experiments using online panels (N = 7,684), I disentangle cheating from lying and demonstrate that cheating and lying are not only theoretically distinct but also meaningfully different behaviors. Specifically, I show that liars are less likely than cheaters to submit a profit-maximizing report and cheaters often feel more positive about themselves after cheating than liars feel after lying. Further, I show that feelings of comfort mediate cheaters' increased willingness to submit a profit-maximizing report and that the decreased likelihood to submit a profit-maximizing report for lying behavior is attenuated when people know that they will not need evidence to corroborate their claims. By identifying these differences, this work reconciles conflicting findings in behavioral ethics scholarship and builds a clearer conceptual foundation for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).