People dislike telling lies; Business and Economics (B&E) students are significantly less lie averse than others; female B&E students tell the truth least often, whereas female students from other majors do so most often

Do economists lie more? Chp 3.1 in Perspectives in Behavioral Economics and the Economics of Behavior, 2019, Pages 143-162. Raúl López-Pérez, Eli Spiegelman. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-815857-9.00003-0

Abstract: Experimental evidence suggests that some people dislike telling lies, and tell the truth even at a cost. We also use experiments, to study the sociodemographic covariates of such lie aversion. We find political ideology and religiosity to be without predictive value; however, subjects’ major is predictive: Business and Economics (B&E) subjects are significantly less lie averse than other majors. This is true even after controlling for subjects’ beliefs about the overall rate of deception, which predict behavior very well. Although B&E subjects expect most others to lie in our decision problem, the effect of the field of study remains. Regarding gender, females and males are equally likely to be lie-averse. In a more disaggregated analysis, however, we also observe that female B&E students tell the truth least often, whereas female students from other majors do so most often. These differences between female students, not observed for the males, seem in fact to drive the larger part of the differences between B&E and the other students.