Religious Canadians willing to lie for money

Do unto others — as long as you recognize them from church.

Incongruous as it sounds, a new Canadian study discovers that the more importance people place on religion, the more likely they are to lie for financial gain. The lead researcher hypothesizes that this “really strange effect” is the result of the faithful feeling less kinship with the secular, and ultimately less concern about screwing them over for a few bucks.

Also likely to fib for personal gain are business majors and people whose parents are divorced: All other things equal, these people are 18.1 and 29.3 per cent, respectively, more likely to be deceptive when money is on the line.

“Lying is a complex behaviour,” said Jason Childs, an associate professor of economics at the University of Regina. “We wanted to start a broader exploration of the characteristics that are associated with it.”

The study, to appear in the December issue of the journal Economics Letters, draws on 400 people randomly separated into pairs. Sex, age, grade-point average, student debt, socioeconomic status and even the size of the return had no real impact on the decision to lie. But area of study, the marital status of the sender’s parents and importance placed on religion all made a difference, with the latter being the most surprising to researchers.

“We had them rate the importance of religion on a scale, and as they went up each point on that scale, they became about four per cent more likely to lie,” said Childs, who proposes that the predominantly secular university population played a role in religious students’ decision to defy a key tenet of their faith (the most common religions on campus are Judaism, Islam and Christianity, all preaching honesty as a virtue).

“My suspicion is that they feel like the receiver isn’t part of their group, and that creates a feeling of otherness. That otherness leads to

“People are dishonest far less often than we think.”

JASON CHILDS, PROFESSOR

feelings of detachment that can increase willingness to lie.”

Of course, this is only a theory. And Childs said the smaller sample size means the results should be treated with caution until they can be replicated.

Other key findings included the tendency for business majors to fib at a higher rate, which is consistent with a wide body of literature on dishonesty among that academic cohort.

“There’s a real possibility that business majors are either devious by nature or by training,” said Childs, noting that the field is known for people who are highly motivated by personal gain, and often competitive to a fault.

Children of divorce also showed higher rates of lying, dovetailing with previous research on the outcomes of broken families.

“There can be a lot of distrust, a lot of really negative sentiment, generated in a divorce, and the children respond to that by acting out in an anti-social manner,” Childs said. “That’s what we’re seeing here.”

The good news is that nearly half the study’s participants opted to tell the truth, even though the experimental design ensured their anonymity, and thus no consequences to lying beyond a guilty conscience.

“That, to me, was pretty remarkable,” Childs said. “People are dishonest far less often than we think.”