Masculinity and lying

Masculinity and lying Marc Vorsatz UNED Santiago Sanchez-Pages University of Barcelona Enrique Turiegano Universidad Autónoma de Madrid March 10, 2016 Abstract Dishonesty in communication has important economic implications. We test whether masculinity is related to lying in a sender-receiver game. We find that several physiology related masculine features have a significant impact on honesty and on the propensity to lie for monetary benefit. Keywords: Lying, cheap-talk, masculinity, testosterone, experiment. JEL codes: C72, C91, D83, D87. All authors have contributed equally to this work. We are grateful to Agnes Pinter and the Madrid Laboratory for Experimental Economics (MADLEE) for their help in the organization of the experiment and to Jose Antonio Muñoz-Reyes for his excellent research assistance. Vorsatz acknowledges funding from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology research grant ECO2015-65701-P and Sanchez-Pages and Turiegano from grant ECO2012-33243. Corresponding author: Department of Economic Theory, University of Barcelona. Avinguda Diagonal 696, 08034 Barcelona, Spain. Email: sanchez.pages@ub.edu. 1

1 Introduction Lying undermines communication, trust and economic exchanges. Therefore, understanding the determinants of lying is of great importance. The experimental literature on sender-receiver games has demonstrated that individuals engage in truthful communication above standard equilibrium predictions. This literature also highlights that purely monetary cost-benefit calculations cannot explain such behavior (e.g. Gneezy, 2005; Sanchez-Pages and Vorsatz, 2007). Individuals refuse to lie even when deception induces Pareto-superior allocations (Erat and Gneezy, 2011) or when it does not affect others (Gibson et al., 2013). An open question is whether biology can be a determinant of this behavior. Recent research in Economics has shown that biological features influence behavior (e.g. Buser, 2012; Pearson and Schipper, 2012). Masculinity, defined as the quality of having masculine physical traits, has become an important element in this research agenda. The development of masculine physiology related traits is associated to organizational changes in the brain during foetal sexual differentiation and puberty, which in turn influence individuals trustworthiness, honesty and competitive bidding (Stirrat and Perrett 2010; Haselhuhn and Wong, 2011; Sanchez-Pages et al., 2014). In this paper, we study experimentally the link between masculinity and (dis)honesty in communication. We find that physiology related masculine features have a significant impact on lying and deception. These effects operate both through preferences and through beliefs about the behaviour of others. 2 Experimental design We use a similar design to Sanchez-Pages and Vorsatz (2007). 1 One of two tables, A or B, is randomly selected with equal probability. Using the strategy method, subjects make their choices in two roles, as sender and as receiver. When choosing as senders, subjects are informed about the table selected and send a message to the receiver telling him which of his two available actions, A or B, will earn the receiver the highest payoff. When choosing as receivers, subjects must select an action for a given sender s message. This is a game of opposing interests. Under Table A, the sender earns 40 points and the receiver earns 100 points if Action A is chosen (100 points = 1EUR). If Action B is chosen, the sender earns 100 points and the receiver earns 40 points. All payoffs are reversed if Table B is selected. These were the choices available in the control treatment. After this, subjects participated in a second treatment, identical to the control one except in that when playing as receivers, they were given the option to accept the payoff distribution or to reduce his and the sender s payoff to zero. They had to make this choice for each possible history of the game. We refer to this as the punishment treatment. In each treatment, we elicited beliefs in an incentive-compatible manner: We paid 100 extra points to subjects whose guess 1 Complete instructions can be found as supplementary material. 2

of the percentage of receivers who would follow the sender s recommendation in their session was 5% above or below the actual one. Lying occurs when subjects send the message Action A (B) will earn you more money than Action B (A) when nature had selected Table B (A). We interpret that a receiver trusted the sender when he took the action recommended to him. The standard game-theoretical prediction for this game is that the sender lies with probability 0.5 and the receiver trusts with probability 0.5 (Crawford and Sobel, 1982). No receiver should reduce payoffs to zero in the punishment treatment. Note that payoff maximization implies that a sender should tell a lie (the truth) if he expects the receiver to trust with more (less). The study was conducted with undergraduate students at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. A total of 168 males participated. After the two treatments were administered, participants were called one by one to an adjacent room where morphometric measurements were taken in private. We took three full frontal facial colour photographs of the participants and scanned their hands. We used these images to compute the three biological measures that we consider in this study: Facial width-to-height ratio (fwhr henceforth), the index-to-ring finger ratio (2D:4D) and facial morphometric masculinity (fmm). fwhr is the ratio between the width and the height of the face, with higher values representing more masculine features. fmm uses morphometric information from the whole facial shape and calculates masculinity as a distance to an average female facial shape. Finally, 2D:4D is the ratio between the length of the index and the ring fingers, with lower values indicating higher prenatal exposure to testosterone. Pearson and Schipper (2012) and Sanchez Pages et al. (2014) detail how to compute these measures. After measurements were taken, a treatment was selected for payment, roles were randomly assigned within each anonymously matched pair of participants, and payoffs were determined according to their decisions. Subjects were then paid in cash. 3 Results Our three physiology related variables correlate slightly. The Spearman s correlation coeffi cient between fmm and fwhr is 0.126 (p=0.022) and between fmm and 2D:4D is -0.128 (p=0.019). No significant correlation exists between fwhr and 2D:4D. In total, 62.5% of senders sent truthful messages in the control treatment and 75.0% in the punishment treatment. These percentages are both well above the theoretical prediction of 50% (p=0.001 and p<0.001 respectively). They are significantly different from each other (p=0.013). The punishment rate after history (lie,trust) was substantial, 27.38%. 2 Trust rates were 63.1% in the control treatment and 58.9% in the punishment one. Both rates are above 50% (p<0.001 and p=0.020 respectively) but they are not different from each other. Beliefs about trust rates were extremely accurate, 61.37% and 58.13% in the 2 The rest of punishment rates were 9.52% for (truth,distrust), 4.77% for (lie, distrust) and 2.97% for (truth,trust). 3

Lie Lie Lie Lie (2 nd stage) (Belief < 50%) (Belief > 50%) (1) (2) (3) (4) fwhr -0.511** -0.453** -0.841** -0.223 (0.218) (0.219) (0.400) (0.299) fmm 1.860 2.303* 4.095** 2.496 (1.258) (1.230) (2.066) (1.859) 2D:4D 2.122** 2.407*** -0.385 3.682*** (0.924) (0.924) (1.310) (1.271) Punishment -0.113*** -0.121*** -0.057-0.162*** (0.042) (0.042) (0.070) (0.058) Belief 0.003*** (0.001) Belief residuals 0.003*** 0.001 (0.002) (0.001) (0.003) (0.002) Observations 333 333 103 190 Robust standard errors in parentheses. *** denotes p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1. Random-effects probit models lead to very similar results. Table 1: Random-effects linear probability models control and punishment treatments respectively. The distribution of beliefs is not different across treatments (Mann-Whitney, p=0.245). We present our results by pooling together the two treatments. This is justified by the similarity of choices across them. Table 1 shows the result of estimating a random-effects linear probability model where the dependent variable is a dummy with value 1 if the subject lied. The independent variables are our three biological measures, a dummy for the punishment treatment, and subjects belief on the percentage of receivers who would trust messages. Coefficients represent percentage point changes in the probability of lying. Estimates in column (1) show that a higher fwhr and a lower 2D:4D are associated with a lower probability of lying. An increase of one standard deviation in fwhr leads to reduction of lying of 5.9 percentage points. A reduction of 2D:4D by one standard deviation leads to a decrease of 5.7 percentage points. One question is whether these effects operate through beliefs about the behavior of receivers. Column (2) accounts for this potential dual effect of our morphometric variables. We substitute the elicited beliefs by the residuals from the estimation in column (1). These residuals are the beliefs left unexplained by our biological variables. Coeffi cients can now be interpreted as the direct effect of these variables on the probability of lying. They increase slightly with respect to column (1). The positive effect of fmm becomes weakly significant. Columns (3) and (4) account for the different ethical and expected monetary implications of lying depending on senders expected trust rates. Column (3) ((4)) restricts the analysis to senders who believed that less (more) than 50% of receivers would trust. These regressions show that the effects of facial 4

masculinity observed in columns (1) and (2) are only significant for the first set of senders, whereas 2D:4D only has a positive impact on the lying decision of senders whose expected trust rates were above 50%. 4 Discussion Masculinity has a complex relationship with honesty in communication. Individuals with higher fmm, lower fwhr and exposed to lower prenatal testosterone are more likely to lie. However, senders with higher fmm are more likely to lie only when they expect receivers to distrust them. This behavior is consistent with guilt aversion (Charness and Dufwenberg, 2006) since lying avoids letting down untrusting receivers. The positive relationship between fwhr and truthtelling only holds for senders who expect receivers to distrust. In that case, telling the truth entails an expected monetary gain and constitutes a sophisticated form of deception (Sutter, 2009). Finally, individuals with higher exposure to prenatal testosterone (lower 2D:4D) are less likely to exploit receivers s trust which suggests they are lying averse (Kartik, 2009; Peeters et al., 2015). Hence, different types of social preferences in sender-receiver games seem to operate through distinct measures of masculinity. Our results regarding fwhr are in line with previous research. Stirrat and Perrett (2010) found that subjects with higher fwhr ar less trustworthy in the trust game. Haselhun and Wong (2012) found that fwhr is positively related to dishonesty in bargaining and to misreporting for a profit. Jia et al. (2014) observed a positive relationship between the fwhr of CEOs and the probability of financial misreporting. The effect of prenatal testosterone we observe is in line with studies indicating that testosterone is associated to prosocial behavior. For instance, Wibral at el (2012) found that testosterone administration reduces misreporting in males. Eisenegger et al. (2011) point out that the link between testosterone and the seek for social status might translate into aggression or competitiveness in some contexts and to prosocial behavior in others. Our results suggest that highstatus might be associated with honesty in communication, especially when it entails a monetary cost. References [1] Buser T. (2012). Digit ratios, the menstrual cycle and social preferences. Games and Economic Behavior, 76: 457-470. [2] Charness G, and Dufwenberg M. (2006). Promises and Partnership. Econometrica, 74: 1579 1601. [3] Crawford V, and Sobel J. (1982). Strategic information transmission. Econometrica, 50: 1431 1451. 5

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