People consistently assume that others are much more likely to lie and cheat than they actually are, and correcting this pessimistic outlook can improve social trust. A recent paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology suggests that individuals overestimate the dishonesty of their peers by a wide margin.
Honesty functions as the invisible glue that holds social and economic systems together. When people act dishonestly, society pays a steep price in the form of unpaid taxes, insurance fraud, and retail theft. However, the beliefs people hold about the inner morality of others have received less attention.
Beliefs about how others behave shape human interactions just as much as reality does. If someone assumes their coworkers or neighbors are prone to cheating, they might support highly restrictive policies or struggle to collaborate. Some findings suggest people overestimate the dishonesty of others to protect themselves from exploitation. Other research on lie detection points to a truth bias, meaning people tend to assume others are telling the truth by default.
To resolve these competing ideas, researchers designed a large project to map the gap between expectations and reality. The scientists began with a comprehensive analysis of their own unpublished data — 31 different comparisons across 11 experiments, involving 8,126 responses from 7,340 unique participants. In these experiments, participants faced situations where they could anonymously lie to receive a small financial bonus without any risk of punishment.
Most tests used a simple die-rolling game. Participants mentally guessed a number, observed a die roll, and then reported if their guess was correct. Because the true probability of guessing right is mathematically known, researchers could calculate the actual percentage of people who lied at the group level. In all these experiments, participants making the choices were also asked to estimate the percentage of their peers who would behave dishonestly.
The data revealed a massive overestimation of dishonesty. Across the 31 comparisons, participants overestimated the rate of dishonest behavior by an average of 13.6 percentage points. About 63.5 percent of participants overestimated cheating by five percentage points or more, while only about a quarter underestimated it.
"People on average overestimated what percentage others behave dishonestly by about 14 percentage points, which is a substantial effect," said study author Jareef Martuza, an assistant professor at the Norwegian School of Economics. "We were quite surprised at how consistent the effect was across several contexts."
Next, the researchers tested whether correcting this bias could change how people view the world. In a study involving 981 adults, those who received factual information — that 70 percent of people are honest in behavioral tests, and that people tend to overestimate cheating by 14 percentage points — reported significantly more positive views of others. They showed higher levels of general trust and a stronger belief that others try to be fair and helpful.
The authors also focused on professional managers, who often design monitoring systems for workplaces. In a study of 285 managers — including directors, vice presidents, and executives — participants predicted that 55 percent of people would lie in the die-rolling game, which was 25 percentage points higher than the true cheating rate. This moral pessimism predicted a stronger preference for strict surveillance and monitoring.
When managers were given the factual data showing most people are honest, they expressed significantly lower support for freedom-restricting measures. The information reduced the perceived need for intense monitoring across five out of six hypothetical business scenarios.
"We are not saying that people are perfectly honest," Martuza clarified. "About 30% of participants in our studies did cheat when given the chance. Our main finding is that people think the number is much higher than it actually is."
"We tend to overestimate how dishonest others are," Martuza concluded. "Most people do not seem to cheat even when their decisions are anonymous, there is no punishment, and there are no reputational consequences. So, we might want to reflect a bit on whether our pessimism about other people's morality might be justified."