How Job Pressures and Extrinsic Rewards Affect Lying Behavior

This study investigates how two situational elements influence people's propensity to lie about their own performance. We hypothesized that, a) people are more likely to lie when rewarded for doing so, b) performance pressures at work lead people to lie about their performance, and c) the joint effect of the two elements led to the highest level of lying. Reward and pressure were manipulated in an experiment with 140 participants. The findings...