AUTHOR=Jacquemet Nicolas , Luchini Stéphane , Rosaz Julie , Shogren Jason F. 

TITLE=Can We Commit Future Managers to Honesty?

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2021

YEAR=2021

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.701627

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.701627

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=In a competitive business environment, dishonesty can pay. Self-interested executives and managers can have incentive to shade the truth for personal gain. In response, the business community has considered how to commit these executives and managers to a higher ethical standard.  The MBA Oath and the Dutch Bankers Oath are examples of such a commitment device.  The question we test herein is whether the oath can be used as an effective form of ethics management for future executives/managers --- who for our experiment we recruited from a leading French business school --- by actually improving their honesty. Using a classic Sender-Receiver strategic game experiment, we reinforce professional identity by pre-selecting the group to which Receivers belong. This allows us to determine whether taking the oath deters lying among future managers.  Our results suggest ``yes and no.'' We observe that these future executives/managers who took a solemn honesty oath as a Sender were \textit{(a)} significantly more likely to tell the truth when the lie was detrimental to the Receiver, but \textit{(b)}  were not more likely to tell the truth when the lie was mutually beneficial to both the Sender and Receiver. A joint product of our design is our ability to measure in-group bias in lying behavior in our population of subjects (comparing behavior of subjects in the same and different business schools). The experiment provides clear evidence of a lack of such bias.