Introduction
The design chosen for any experiment plays a crucial role in achieving the study’s purpose. Several options can be considered when conducting a white lie experiment, depending on the desired outcome. Since the proposed study will seek to understand why people use white lies and their justifications, the study will explore multiple interest areas and diversities to further explore the relationships that exist between them.
Experiment Brief
The proposed white lie experiment is mainly to determine how people can give false information based on their settings. The experiment will comprise using two sets of cards, one inscribed with the words: kindness, generosity, and giving” while the other will be blank. Each card will be sealed in an envelope and will be opened by the respondent.
By choosing to tell lies or the truth about their cards, the participants will reveal the altruistic and implicature nature of their choices. While the experimenter will not follow up with the participants to know their specific reason for their lies, the research will indicate that people are motivated to tell white lies in different circumstances.
Components of the Experiment
The proposed experiment will have different components, which will be achieved in two major stages. In stage one, each participant will be required to be alone and report their results based on their perspectives. In this stage, the participants will act from their convictions without considering any other external factor that can sway their thoughts in any direction. Thus, if a person chooses to lie, it is because it is their intrinsic nature, or their choice will have been impacted by what they understand from a personal point of view.
On the other hand, stage two will involve pairing the participants into two respondents so they can discuss their options and research an agreement on what course they should take. It is expected that the two may not reach an agreement within the allocated time due to their differences and the use of white lies.
In an event that the pair parties do not agree within the allocated duration, they will be given five more minutes of which they will be expected to reach a final verdict of their collective choice. However, if they do not agree after the added time, their responses and donations will be inclined regardless of the result they give.
The experiment will also be further divided into two such that half of the participants will be expected to give their responses, first as individuals, then as a group, while the other half will give responses as a group and then as an individual. This will be crucial as it will help the research team to understand the impact of switching from a participant to a group or from stage one to stage two. The proposed research expects that the outcomes are expected to change due to the shifting of the burden of decision.
This is expected because according to Dana et al. (2020), two or more people are expected to have divergent opinions in a complex situation, which can be presented to them in different settings. While it is also possible that there cannot be conflicting ideas between any single pair, the discussion period provided is expected to generate a divergent opinion, which each participant may further explore individually.
Each participant will also select a card from those supplied by the researcher. Those who report having received a card with inscriptions will be expected to select the donate option. The participants who receive blank cards will be required to select not to donate option. The process will be explained for the participants’ understanding and smooth experimentation. Moreover, they will be duly informed that their choices will remain anonymous, whereby no one will know the choices made by an individual.
Furthermore, to ensure absolute anonymity in the experiment, the participants will be asked to destroy and discard their cards after filling out their forms. No one will be forced to choose a donation option and the specified donation amount. More specifically, the donation would happen only if an individual got a card with the words inscribed on their forms. Consequently, the total donations will depend on the results collected from all the participants who respond with the donate answers.
Proposed Experiment Procedure
The proposed experiment will be conducted in multiple steps for progressive performance monitoring. The first step will entail providing details regarding the experiment and all the activities that will be done throughout the study. The information will be crucial as it will ensure that each participant is aware of what to expect and how to conduct themselves during the research. Moreover, this will give the researcher an earlier opportunity to get crucial feedback from the participants ahead of the actual experiment.
However, the opinions given by the participating members will change the initial target and design of the experiment, but the information will help inform the subsequent parts of the study. The researcher will divide the tasks and activities into smaller sub-activities to make the participants better understand what they should expect in each process of the experiment.
The second step will involve assigning each participant a specific that will allow them to know their ID while undertaking the experiment. This will be important because it will allow the participants to specifically know what they are supposed to do in each step and to follow their progress and subsequent activities throughout the process.
In addition, identification will also allow the researcher to perfectly follow the performance of each participant, thus analyzing the study’s outcomes. Tracking the participants through their ID numbers will also ensure that the proposed research adheres to the privacy of the members, as they will only be referred to by identification numbers.
The third step will involve placing each participant in isolated areas or rooms. While in their secluded sections, each participant will be given an enclosed envelope and a form so they can fill them based on the information they get from the envelope. Only the participants will be allowed to open the envelopes and read the contents therein and will thus destroy them without letting any other person see the envelopes.
The participants will contain a section where participants will fill in their ID number and the area or room code where they were located during their form-filling process. The form will also contain two choices allowing the participants to tick either donate or not to donate options. Each participant will be duly informed to record their findings based on the card they received from the researcher.
The fourth step will take the study a level higher by pairing the participants in isolated areas or rooms. They will then be given a written monologue, which will attempt to sway their opinions to donate even if their cards contained the not to donate option. This monologue is intended primarily to shift the choices that the participants may have during the initial step, so they can lie about their cards in favor of donating. However, the monologue will be biased to ensure that those who had decided to donate do not change their minds.
The fifth step will involve giving the pair participants a single envelope which they will be expected to open and read together. Based do the contents of the card they receive, and the monologue given to them, they will then fill out a form together based on their convictions of each other. They will each fill in their ID numbers and the code of the area or room in which they were assigned. They will then choose between two options, either to donate or not to donate.
Moreover, each of the pairs will be informed to record their options based on the card they received. This will attempt to keep them from heeding the persuasion they received from the monologue and stick to the truth, which is to be accurate based on the card they received.
The final step of the experiment will involve filling out a general form about the participants. Each member will be requested to complete a form about their general information that cannot be used to particularly identify them. They will be expected to give information such as their age, gender, ethnicity, level of education, and background.
These pieces of information will help the researcher to identify the variations in white lies across multiple domains. This is crucial because past studies such as Banks (2020) and Bewersdorff (2021) focused on white lies among males and females, while Jakubowska et al. (2019) explored white lies in different age groups. The proposed study will thus explore these differences considering the past studies, thus, explicitly giving the findings on morals, significance, and justifications of white lies.
Pre-Analysis Plan
The proposed study will explore different factors associated with white lies, such as why people lie, how they lie, and when they lie. These three factors are crucial as they help understand the circumstances that lead to white lies, and the unknown reasons that motivate one to lie. Moreover, the factors will also help the study know the critical situations and settings that can make people lie, based on whether they want to control something, or something is beyond their control.
Hubbell (2019) explored the concept of complicated deception, which plays a vital role in the recipient’s end of choosing to lie or tell the truth. In the proposed experiment, there are three specific elements of the experiment, which are vital for the analysis of white lies. These include the sender of the message, the message, and the recipient and their feedback on the message given. This analogy is given for ease of analysis of the entire process as the core goal is to understand how the participants use the information they get in the cards within their envelopes.
Considering a sender in this case, the researcher knows the numbers of the cards that are supposed to donate and those that are meant not to donate. However, the researcher does not control the intent of the recipient, though uses monologue to persuade the participants to act against the information they get, particularly, those who get the not to donate option.
Therefore, supposing this could indicate that the researcher prefers the donate option (A) to not to donate option (B), such that the expectation is leaned towards getting more donations, then there will be a high probability that the receivers will try to give negated feedback. To get more donations, the researcher will use deception (C), which will be greater than B. This assumption is made factoring in that the employed deception will not sway those who already have made the option of donating because their cards indicated they should donate.
However, even though the assumption pre-empts that more than half of the participants will not follow the message they got on their card, the expanded message space and the time for consultation may make the monologue less effective.
Consequently, the researcher will assume that the recipients will follow the information they get from the cards, which is further emphasized by the brief they are given the moment they are provided with the forms. The proportion of the recipients that will deliberately lie, based on their specific treatment, will thus be presented through a graphical method, where the initial point will indicate the payoffs from each participant who donates but received a not to donate card. Such proportions will represent the actual fraction of the participants who lied about the card they received.
The resulting proportions will provide a way for the researcher to delve into empirical results. First, altruistic white lies will be considered, where the researcher will lose money due to fewer cards with donate results. This will indicate that a significant fraction of the respondents will lie when the choice they make helps them less than they help the researcher. Moreover, a substantial number of participants will also be expected to consider altruistic white lies due to the monologue treatment given.
In this case, most of the participants with blank cards may choose to lie and donate, which may increase the number of donations altogether. Such outcomes may strongly support the effect of social preferences on individuals’ choices to use deception to satisfy their desires. Thus, the participants may choose to donate for the benefit of the researcher assuming their money would be used for a good course.
Using a within-subject approach is crucial in providing evidence of white lie use among different groups. In this case, each participant will be subjected to only a specific choice, which is guarded by choosing only one option from a single card they receive. Consequently, the statistical analysis will be based on random assignment, whereby the study will consider the difference resulting from various treatments. On the other hand, using a within-subject approach will help in identifying how different factors may help change the white lies that people can tell.
For instance, the study will explore how persuasion from participants’ partners and monologue can help sway the participants’ opinion to donate or not to donate. The approach is also crucial as it helps the researcher to compare the findings when the participants decide as individuals and when they decide as groups. It is expected that the results will change significantly due to the treatments given.
One of the main issues associated with the within-design approach is the demand of the participants. This indicates that the researcher will be forced to use more participants to get a significant number of responses that can be used in quantitative analysis. Another drawback of using a within-design is that it may make the participants feel they are forced to make a certain decision, which may not reflect their opinions and choices.
However, the payoff measured in the study is how participants are likely to tell a white lie based on their different situations and ethical conducts. Consequently, this approach will produce the intended outcome as more participants will lie due to the presented circumstances or they will defy them to tell a lie about the cards they received.
Experiment Summary
The experiment is likely to find out that the choice to use a white lie may be for the benefit of the recipient. For instance, the participants may lie about their empty cards and donate to help increase the donations for a course they may not have been told. In areas where the level of education is high, it is expected that their donations may be high irrespective of their cards. This findings will further indicate that lies possess their respective costs irrespective of their recipients.
In this case, the cost of white lies will be observed from both economic and psychological perspectives. The economic side is mainly felt by the researcher, who is the sole recipient of the donations. On the other hand, those who lie about receiving a blank card and thus do not donate may most likely experience emotional disturbances for telling lies and not donating. However, this study does not focus on the mental effects of white lies, since it covers a different realm.
Moreover, the findings from the proposed experiment will provide evidence about lie aversion, which is without distributional preferences. Thus, the aversion to lying may not be fully comprehended as it causes harm to the participants since aversion is evident on every occasion, including when all the parties gain by lying or being lied to by others. Thus, the experiment will be interesting when further research is conducted in this area regarding factors that motivate white lies.
For instance, Besancenot and Vranceanu (2020) who studied selfish black lies, revealed that there are two specific dimensions of lies. Firstly, aversion strongly as the speaker deviates from the truth. Secondly, utilizing a richer monologue or persuasion may depend on the premises given by the sender of the message. Thus, the recipients are likely to lie more and donate if the monologue given will entail a lot of promises that they may find attractive to them or their community.
The proposed experiment also pre-empts that the researcher will be sensitive to the costs or benefits associated with the parties concerned in the game. Kuhn et al. (2020) indicate that this is mostly expected since more participants are likely to lie about their cards. This indicates that the cost of lying is likely to be high for the researcher, which may make the sender give more deceptive messages to benefit from more donations.
On the other hand, Dugar et al. (2019) reveal that as the sender uses more lies, the same attracts more falsehood among the recipients. This outcome will further support the assumption that an individual’s decision to lie is motivated by the incentives they get from participating in any given activity.
The proposed experiment will further demonstrate that the sender of a given message, which in this case refers to the researcher, is likely to use more white lies to gain better incentives from the participants. By using a more focused monologue to persuade participants to donate even when their cards say otherwise, the study will explore the relationship between altruistic lies and Pareto lies.
This result will reflect the findings by Giardini et al. (2019), Yip and Fisher (2022), and Vendetti et al. (2019), who revealed that speakers are prone to lie when the cost of the recipients bear more costs. Moreover, the proposed research outcome further extends the finding by Giardini et al. (2019) that receivers’ costs affect the extent of white lies among the participants.
This finding will be revealed through a regression analysis, which will test the likelihood of lying when the participant expects a loss or gain. Overall, the study will indicate that the probability of lying becomes greater when the benefit is greater for the individual telling the lie.
The finding envisioned above goes against some of the past researchers’ results. For instance, Beck et al. (2020) and Verigin et al. (2019), studied white lies and revealed that white lies are mainly used to help the recipients. Lander et al. (2018) indicated that white lies are used to help police officers gain significant information regarding their criminal investigations. The proposed research indicates that the recipient of the message is lured into falling into the trap of the speakers, rather than gaining their expected outcomes.
For instance, the researcher will use a lot of persuasions to try and force the participants to give more donations. In this case, if the study should go in favor of the researcher, then more donations will be given because the participants will think about the gains they will get from their little donations. This trend will be indicated by a graphical presentation to show how lies grow with benefits associated with benefits.
As indicated earlier, the researcher will be forced to lie more to increase the payoff from the participants. A critical consideration of this trend will indicate that the cost of lies decrease on the receiver’s side, or their benefits increase compared to the sender (Feess et al., 2022). The expected study’s outcome will provide generalized findings on the importance of promises and incentives to increase white lies among participants.
Most importantly, there is a conflict of interest between the two sides, with each party desiring to win the game and receive more benefits and utilize the least cost possible. However, this finding will hide the differences existing between individual parties involved in the experiment.
For example, the proposed study makes it plausible that the researcher who sends an altruistic message may likely tell a white lie as opposed to a selfish black lie. It is likely that to gain more donations, the researcher will choose to use white lies as opposed to appearing selfish in a straightforward lie to gain more donations. On the contrary, a selfish researcher or sender may not use such an approach, instead, they can use blatant approaches to ensure they get what they want from their targets.
Another aspect that the proposed study considers is the difference between white lies among males and females. Is it possible that women lie more than men or what could incentives play in changing their propensity to lie? Jampol and Zayas (2021) studied the difference between white lies among men and women and revealed that there was a significant systematic difference between the two genders based on the factors affecting their decision-making approaches.
Jampol and Zayas (2021) found out that men can easily use lies to gain monetary incentives as opposed the women. The proposed study assumes that men are likely to lie about their cards and may choose to donate or not to donate based on the incentives and losses they will calculate based on the choices they will have to make.
However, this hypothesis does not indicate that men lie more than women. However, the proposed study assumes that women are more likely to use altruistic white lies compared to men, especially when the lie hurt them but helps others a lot more. Thus, this approach will help to further explore the burden of mental accountability based on white lies one tells.
The proposed findings give the researcher a better approach to consider in using the monologue presented to the participants. For instance, giving the receivers a more touching story about what their donations can do to the lives of people suffering in areas that the researcher has identified may significantly change the number of donations.
Moreover, this opportunity may also make the researcher select more women for the study with the anticipation that more women will choose to donate more because of the persuasion they receive. However, the main goal of the study is not to get more donations, but rather to measure the extent of white lies and how persuasion can further help achieve the objective of the study.
Based on the proposed findings, the experiment will confirm that every society has norms that define principles that people within the community must follow to live harmoniously with their peers. Such principles require people to always tell the truth or to protect each other from any form of harm by telling white lies. Speakers are expected to say the truth when speaking to their listeners.
However, Nyhan (2020) noted that there are situations when the speakers are compelled to lie about what they know with the pure intention of protecting the public. Other speakers lie to take advantage of their audiences by identifying various loopholes and vulnerabilities of the audience. Still, humanistic language use compels speakers to be tactful and choosy with the words they use to pass their falsehoods to their listeners.
As indicated by Say et al. (2021), white lies are used to keep listeners safe from any form of abuse or to easily navigate a problem without causing them any harm. Consequently, white lies are used in various situations and by different people to gain significant outcomes intended by the speaker.
The explored literature materials reveal that several critical parameters are used to define white lies. One of the primary aspects is the use of white lies among medics during patient care as indicated by Cantone et al. (2019). In this case, nurses may lie about the condition of their patients if they believe that such lies can help protect the lives of the sick instead of worsening Geerse et al. (2019).
For instance, a patient diagnosed with the last stage of cancer may be given hope of living several days, which may help them recover from their condition. The studies also indicate that white lies in medical setups can be because of the incompetence of the medics or their lack of knowledge of their respective areas of interest Cantone et al. (2019).
Moreover, the study also revealed that the police can also use white lies during criminal investigations to help them crack more codes on the various crimes they are investigating. Furthermore, the literature reviewed also revealed that white lies can be used when talking with children about some issues that may be beyond their level of comprehension. They are thus told lies to help them grow with the appropriate information, which they learned better as they become older. While these are the major areas where white lies are justified, several other situations also result in white lies.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the proposed study will explore various factors that are associated with white lies, including what motivates them to falsehood. It is expected that more people will lie about their cards, for fear of giving donations to the benefit of the researcher.
Some participants are expected to lie that they received a blank card because of their circumstances, including not having the amount to donate. On the other hand, some other participants will also lie that they received cards with the inscriptions, thus choosing to donate as opposed to choosing not to donate as given in the instruction. The researcher will exploit this option by providing an additional monologue to help sway the participants to choose to donate even if their cards were blank.
Using monologue and persuasion will be critical as it will ensure that the researcher can gain a significant number of participants who will lie about the cards they received. The proposed study further expects that men will lie more when they expect monetary benefits while women will lie more when they benefit less than the recipients.
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