Individuals from across the world show similar levels of dishonesty, according to research published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology.
“At their core, people appear to be more similar in their tendencies toward dishonesty than they realize,” wrote the research team, which was lead by Heather Mann of Duke University. “Our data suggest that cross-national differences in dishonesty run only skin deep.”
Mann and her colleagues used an iPad game to test the honesty of 2,495 individuals from China, Colombia, Germany, Portugal, and the United States. The individuals in the five countries came from two separate groups, college students and the general public.
In the iPad game, called the die task, the participants rolled virtual dice repeatedly. They were instructed to mentally choose a side of the die, roll the die, then indicate which side they chose. The participants earned money for correctly guessing which side would come up on top, and they could easily cheat under conditions of plausible deniability.
The researchers were able to calculate the level of dishonesty by comparing the average proportion of “correct” guesses to what would be statistically predicted by chance. They found that across all countries, the proportion of correct guesses was significantly above chance, meaning that people tended to cheat during the game.
Mann and her colleagues found no significant difference between the level of dishonesty in the five countries. Individuals from across the world were “remarkably consistent.” The researchers also failed to find a link between the level of corruption in a country and the level of dishonesty in the die task.
There was one difference found: students were more dishonest than the general public in every country except for Portugal.
The findings suggest that our core tendencies toward dishonesty are all similar in situations that are relatively free of cultural norms. But that doesn’t mean people from across the world have the same level of dishonesty in all situations.
“We do not suggest that culture and corruption have no impact on dishonesty,” Mann and her colleagues said. “Rather, we suggest that culture influences dishonesty primarily by establishing norms for the acceptability of dishonest behavior in specific situations (e.g., bribing a police officer, music piracy, plagiarism).”
