Experimental data to “Attempting to detect a lie: Do we think it through?”

DOI

Game-theoretic analyses of communication rely on beliefs – especially, the receiver's belief about the truth status of an utterance and the sender's belief about the reaction to the utterance – but research that provides measurements of such beliefs is still in its infancy. Our experiment examines the use of second-order beliefs, measuring belief hierarchies regarding a message that may be a lie. In a two-player communication game between a sender and a receiver, the sender knows the state of the world and has a transparent incentive to deceive the receiver. The receiver chooses a binary reaction. For a wide set of non-equilibrium beliefs, the reaction and the receiver's second-order belief should dissonate: she should follow the sender's statement if and only if she believes that the sender believes that she does not follow the statement. The opposite is true empirically, constituting a new pattern of inconsistency between actions and beliefs.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.7805/jnw-sob-2025
Metadata Access https://api.datacite.org/dois/10.7805/jnw-sob-2025
Provenance
Creator Jawer, Julia; Nielsen, Hedda; Weizsäcker, Georg
Publisher Ifo Institute for Economic Research
Publication Year 2025
OpenAccess true
Representation
Language English
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/csv
Size 41 KB
Discipline Social Sciences
Spatial Coverage Germany