Thursday 1 March 2012

Economists lie more

From the Economic Logic blog comes this comment on some recent research.
Raúl López-Pérez and Eli Spiegelman performed some experiments where lying could be a winning strategy. While religiosity or gender does not impact the propensity of lying, one's undergraduate major matters, and the Business and Economics students fare the worst. And this does not come from selection into the major, it is acquired. So economists do lie more, because they see incentives to do so. Hence journalists should learn to interview economists that have no incentives to lie.
So non-economists don't lie because they are not smart enough to workout there is an advantage to doing so? So they are honest but dumb. If you point out the incentive to lie, do non-economists then lie? If the result is due to training, they should. If they don't then is the result really due to training?

Also shouldn't journalists learn not interview anyone who has an incentive to lie? Of course this would mean they would have no one to interview!

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