Evidence for Intergroup Bias in Coalitional but not Selfish Dishonesty

According to canonical normative theories in philosophy, moral transgressions–like lying–are equally wrong regardless of whom they help or harm. In contrast, recent research suggests that people use social identity cues to make moral judgments and decisions. This paper examines the possibility that people misreport factual information to benefit the in-group and harm the out-group. Across three experiments, we gave U.S. Democrat and Republican voters (N=5,230) a chance to lie anonymously to double their own or another participant’s earnings. For selfish dishonesty (Experiment 1), people lied equally to benefit themselves regardless of whether it harmed an in-group or out-group member. For coalitional dishonesty (Experiment 2), however, people lied significantly more to benefit in-group than out-group members (9 percentage-points), despite not personally benefiting from lying. Experiment 3 successfully replicated these findings, and revealed that people overestimated out-group dishonesty more than in-group dishonesty. In conclusion, intergroup coalitional dishonesty drives moral decision-making.