STRESS, HAPPINESS AND DISHONEST BEHAVIOR: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Abstract

Dishonesty in the workplace is nothing new. For years, researchers in economics, business management, and psychology have sought to understand what causes people to act dishonestly. Our experiment aims to find out if emotions have an effect on honesty. Using a simple dierolling task created by Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013) to detect levels of dishonesty, we tested the effects of induced Happiness, Anxiety, and Neutrality on students at the University of Arizona. The experiment is designed in such a way that dishonesty cannot be detected on an individual level, and instead is measured by analyzing the aggregate data of a certain group of subjects. This gives subjects an incentive to behave dishonestly and maximize their payoff without fear of repercussion. This also allows us to measure levels of dishonesty and compare moderate lying to severe lying. Through our analysis, we found that people do indeed behave more honestly in a state of Happiness than they do in a state of Neutrality or Stress.