Intergroup bias in dishonesty: In-group favouritism, out-group hostility, or both?

Clear-cut lying for personal gain is widely considered immoral. But does it matter whom one is lying to? As individual decisions naturally occur in social context, the acceptability of dishonesty may depend on the group identity of the interaction partner - posing a serious challenge for intergroup cooperation and societal polarization. Providing an economic incentive to lie without detection risk, using the “mind-game paradigm” from behavioral economics, we will examine the following questions: (1) Are people more likely to behave dishonestly toward their out-groups than in-groups? (2) Is this intergroup bias in dishonesty driven by in-group favoritism, out-group hostility, or both? Experiment 1 (N = 2100) will test these hypotheses by creating artificial groups in a nationally representative US sample (minimal-groups design). Experiment 2 (N = 2100) will study natural groups in the political domain, recruiting Americans who identify as either a Democrat or a Republican. Crucially, the personal identity of participants is kept anonymous when they complete the risk-free cheating task, which excludes any reputational consequences from deciding to tell the truth or not. If the primary hypothesis of a general intergroup bias in dishonesty should be supported in this mind-game paradigm, that would provide novel evidence that the internal moral cost of lying is systematically different for in-groups than out-groups. Using unclassified recipients in the neutral control condition as a comparison, more (less) prevalent dishonesty toward out-group (in-group) members will be interpreted as support for out-group hostility (in-group favoritism) as the primary mechanism of the general intergroup bias.