To celebrate our 5th anniversary, present and past editors of the journal discuss some of their favourite papers and highlight what made them stand out.
From 2001 to 2009, the United States Central Intelligence Agency operated a policy of covert capture and interrogation of suspected terrorists known as Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation (RDI).Over the past decade, scholars, policy-makers, and human rights advocates have debated both the morality and effectiveness of the program, but there has been little discussion of its wider consequences.A new study by Averell Schmidt and Kathryn Sikkink of Harvard University examines the effects of the program on the practices of countries that participated in, but did not create, the program.Using crossnational data on human rights practices over time, they show that authoritarian states that actively participated in the RDI program developed significantly worse human rights records after their collaboration began.Even after the program ended in 2009, authoritarian countries that participated continued to engage in more abusive practices compared to their prior policies and compared to the practices of similar nondemocratic states that did not collaborate.The practices of democratic countries that participated in the RDI program did not significantly change, suggesting that democratic institutions could play a role in preventing the spread of adverse policies.The study highlights the potential for policy choices made by one country to influence the actions of other countries through covert cooperation mechanisms.
Do people always lie when it is in their interest to do so and they won't be caught?Traditionally, economic models have assumed that the answer to this question is yes.In contrast, a new study by Johannes Abeler, of University of Oxford, and colleagues finds that people lie much less than expected.The researchers first performed a meta-analysis of 90 studies that experimentally evaluated lying at the group level by providing participants with incentives to misreport private information and no possibility of being caught.Despite these circumstances, lying was far from universal.On average, participants gave up threequarters of the gains they could have earned if they lied.To facilitate further exploration and analysis of their meta-study data, the authors also created an interactive website, http://www.preferencesfortruthtelling.com/.The authors next evaluated the fit of a range of formal models capturing different explanations for honesty.They found that a wide range of models could potentially explain the meta-study data.Finally, the authors conducted four new experiments to test these plausible mechanisms.They found that truth-telling is motivated both by a preference for being honest and a preference for being perceived as honest.The study synthesizes a large volume of evidence and provides insight into the reasons behind an important and socially beneficial behaviour.
