People always believe that others are more likely to lie or cheat than they actually are, and correcting this pessimistic view can improve social trust. Recent papers published in Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that individuals significantly overestimate the dishonesty of their co-workers. Providing accurate information about actual levels of integrity tends to reduce support for intense workplace surveillance and promote a more positive view of human nature.
Honesty acts as the invisible glue that binds social and economic systems together. When people act dishonestly, society pays a steep price in the form of unpaid taxes, insurance fraud, retail theft, and more. Psychology and economics have extensively documented the factors that tempt people to lie for personal gain. However, the beliefs people hold about the internal morality of others have received less attention.
Beliefs about how others behave shape relationships, just as reality does. People who think their co-workers and neighbors are prone to cheating may support very restrictive policies or have a hard time cooperating with them. In the existing literature, some findings are consistent with the prediction that people overestimate the dishonesty of others. Research on cynical thinking shows that people may assume the worst about others to protect themselves from exploitation.
Other research on lie detection points to truth bias, or the tendency for people to assume by default that others are telling the truth. This perspective predicts that people may underestimate how often others lie. To resolve these competing ideas, researchers designed a large-scale project to map the gap between expectations and reality. They wanted to see whether people’s beliefs about dishonesty matched their actual rates of deceptive behavior when no personal consequences were at stake.
“I wrote my doctoral thesis on moral decisions,” said study author Jarif Martuza, assistant professor of strategy and management at the Norwegian School of Economics. “In my experiment, I gave hundreds of participants the opportunity to lie and receive a monetary bonus. I also asked them, out of curiosity, to predict what percentage of the other participants would cheat.”
Martuza explained his initial expectations. “I thought the average person would be able to estimate correctly,” he says. “But they seemed to consistently overestimate. Ironically, my beliefs about other people’s beliefs were wrong. So I began to formally study using more experiments, because systematically overestimating others’ dishonesty is important to know and to communicate to others.”
The scientists began with a comprehensive internal analysis of their own unpublished data. It includes 31 different comparisons across 11 experiments, including 8,126 responses from 7,340 unique participants. In these experiments, participants faced situations in which they could lie anonymously and receive a small monetary bonus without being punished.
Most of these tests used simple dice rolling games. Participants guessed the numbers in their heads, observed the rolls of the dice, and reported whether their guesses were correct. Because the true probability of a guess being correct was known mathematically, the researchers were able to calculate the actual proportion of people who lied to get money at a group level.
In another task, participants played a color matching game. They may falsely report seeing memorized colors on a new list in order to gain cash at the expense of anonymous partners. In all of these experiments, participants making choices were also asked to estimate the proportion of their peers who would cheat.
The data revealed a significant overestimation of fraud. Across the 31 comparisons, participants overestimated the rate of cheating by an average of 13.6 percentage points. The researchers noted that 63.5 percent of participants overestimated cheating by more than 5 percent. Only about a quarter of participants underestimated the rate of cheating.
“On average, people overestimate the rate at which others will cheat by about 14 percentage points, which is a significant effect,” Martuza said. He and his team didn’t expect this pattern to be so robust. “We were very surprised that the effect was consistent across situations, and that it also varied across individuals, such as whether a person acted honestly or dishonestly before reporting their beliefs,” he said.
This pessimistic bias was especially strong in economic games involving real money compared to hypothetical retail scenarios. Scientists suggest that substantial financial incentives make the temptation to lie more pronounced. Participants may project this heightened temptation onto others, inflating the perception that cheating is widespread.
The scientists also conducted a supplementary survey asking people what they thought about other people’s beliefs. “In our supplemental study, most people recognized that others held inaccurate beliefs about honesty, but there was no consensus on whether people overestimated or underestimated dishonesty,” Martuza explained. “This suggests that our findings were not that predictable.”
The researchers then tested whether correcting this pessimistic bias would change the way people saw the world. In a second study of 981 adults, scientists divided participants into two groups. The treatment group read a short text that detailed the actual study results. The text explains that 70 percent of people are honest on these behavioral tests.
The paper also explains that people tend to mistakenly overestimate cheating by 14 percentage points. The control group received a general explanation of the study but no specific statistics. After reading the text, all participants answered questions measuring broader social expectations.
Those who received factual information about higher levels of conscientiousness reported more positive views of others. They showed higher levels of general trust and a stronger belief that others would try to be fair and kind. The informed group also showed lower levels of general cynicism and evidence that modifying specific negative beliefs can broadly improve their social outlook.
The authors then focused on professional managers, who often design workplace rules and monitoring systems. In the third study, 285 professional managers answered questions about dice rolling games and real-world scenarios. The sample included directors, vice presidents, and executives recruited through an online survey platform.
Administrators estimated that six types of fraud were prevalent. These include workplace theft, inflating expense reports, overreporting hours, purchasing counterfeit goods, insurance fraud, shoplifting, and more. For each act, administrators provided an estimate of the number of people who actually performed these acts and the number of people who admitted to doing so.
Like the general public, administrators vastly overestimated how many people would cheat in a dice roll game. They predicted that 55 percent of people would lie, which was 25 percentage points higher than the actual cheating rate. The administrators also estimated that the actual rate of cheating in the real world is much higher than the rate people confess in anonymous surveys.
This moral pessimism predicted an increased tendency to call for strict measures such as increased surveillance and surveillance to prevent theft and fraud. To see if the information could change these policy preferences, the scientists conducted a fourth study of 741 managers. Similar to the second study, half of the managers received factual data showing that most people are honest.
The other half served as the control group. Next, both groups rated their support for workplace surveillance and strict rules. They used a sliding scale ranging from minus 50 indicating a desire to reduce measures to plus 50 indicating a desire to significantly increase measures.
The researchers wanted to establish a causal relationship between knowing the facts and choosing workplace policies. Information processing worked as intended. Managers who knew the true percentage of honest people had significantly lower support for countermeasures that restricted freedom. By providing evidence-based statistics, we were able to adjust our risk assessments and reduced the need for strong monitoring systems in five out of six hypothetical business scenarios.
“Our paper provides preliminary evidence that the more people overestimate, the more they support surveillance measures, and correcting misconceptions appears to reduce surveillance preferences,” Martuza said. However, he pointed out the limitations of these findings. “However, while we showed that correcting misconceptions changes people’s attitudes toward surveillance policies, we have not yet tested whether it changes actual organizational decisions.”
Although this project provides strong evidence of pessimism bias, readers should be aware of several caveats. “I’m not saying people are completely honest,” Martuza clarified. “About 30% of our study participants cheated when given the opportunity. Our main finding is that people think that number is much higher than it actually is.”
Because the sample is geographically focused, several questions remain. “All of our participants were based in the United States and were recruited online, so we don’t yet know whether the same pattern holds across different cultures,” Martuza added.
The exact psychological mechanisms behind this bias also remain an open question. It is possible that negative events simply stick in people’s minds more easily and color general perception. Another possibility is the halo effect in the second study, where hearing positive news automatically triggers an overall positive mood. The halo effect occurs when one positive characteristic or piece of information influences all other perceptions about a person.
Moreover, reading short texts from online surveys cannot reproduce the complex decision-making processes of real corporate environments. Online survey platforms rely on self-reported job titles and are therefore not necessarily fully representative of top-level decision makers. The authors note that organizational culture and financial costs also influence policy. Overestimating fraud may be just one of many factors that influence managers’ support for strict monitoring.
“Personally, this project revealed how often our beliefs do not match reality,” Martuza reflected. “My colleagues and I are investigating other aspects of moral beliefs and misperceptions in other areas where mistaken beliefs can have consequences.”
Being aware of this bias can help individuals navigate their daily interactions with a little more grace. “We tend to overestimate how dishonest others are,” Martuza concluded. “Of course, the potential downsides of trusting strangers can be significant. But most people don’t seem to cheat even when their decisions are anonymous, unpunished, and have no reputational impact. So you might want to take a moment to consider whether your pessimistic views about the morality of others are justified.”
The study, “Belief and Reality: People Overestimate the Actual Dishonesty of Others,” was authored by Jarif Martuza, Helge Thorbjornsen, and Halgeir Sjostad.
