In Mexico, police officer’s dishonesty is one of the main concerns of society. According to the National Survey of Victimization and Perception on Public Safety, it is estimated that more than 55% of the Mexican population... [ view full abstract ]
In Mexico, police officer’s dishonesty is one of the main concerns of society. According to the National Survey of Victimization and Perception on Public Safety, it is estimated that more than 55% of the Mexican population considers that police corporations are corrupt, and 51.2% of citizens do not trust the police (INEGI, 2017). Different policies have been implemented to reduce police dishonesty, such as the creation of internal control bodies, vetting processes and higher sanctions due to unethical behavior. However, levels of corruption in police officers have not decreased as it was expected. Behavioral science offers new ways to understand behavior and to incentive ethical behavior.
In this study we explore how the use of framing and emotions elicitation can promote honest behavior in police officers, specifically we address the following question: how does the presentation of incentives as gains or losses, and the elicitation of positive emotions, influence dishonesty of Mexican police officers? To determine the extent to which these aspects influence police officers’ dishonesty, we designed an experiment based on the “die paradigm” first proposed by Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013). This experimental setup has the advantage of being easy to implement and modify to test different theoretical predictions.
In our design, first we elicit a positive emotion by asking one group of the participants to remember a proud moment and we give a neutral stimuli to another group of participants. Then, we manipulate the presentation of payoffs as gains or losses. We found evidence that police officers misreported their outcomes but that they, as previous literature suggests, did not lie to the maximum level possible. Also, we found differences between the gain and loss conditions: loss aversion motivated a more dishonest behavior. Finally, the elicitation of pride resulted in more police officers lying to the maximum.
This study has two main contributions. First, it replicate the dice paradigm in an entire different population. The dice paradigm has been implemented with students as participants, while the participants of this experiment are police officers. Second, we explore the interaction between elicitation of emotions and the loss aversion framing.
