You Can’t Hide Your Lying Eyes: Honesty Oaths and Misrepresentation

•People often face incentives to misrepresent their personal, perhaps qualifying, characteristics, such as in job or college applications.•An experiment performed on MTurk asks people to self-report their eye color, both under oath and without oaths.•Honesty oaths can significantly reduce misrepresenting oneself, primarily on extreme misrepresentation (big lies) but not on small, plausible ones.•Beliefs about othersreporting behavior affects one decision to deceive. If one expects most others to lie, they lie too. Lying about race or personal characteristics for a job or in college admissions is common and has recently become a high profile issue. In this paper, we explore the decision to misrepresent oneself and determine how honesty oaths impact personal characteristic reporting. To do this, we execute an experiment on Amazon MTurk, using a self-reporting task involving human eye color. We find that honesty oaths elicit more truthful behavior – primarily reducing implausible lies (maximal outcome lies). As a result, we spent 27.6% less on bonuses than we would have without oath-taking. There is some evidence that if one believes lying is common, they are more likely to lie as well. We conclude that oaths decrease extreme misrepresentation and expectations of group behavior significantly impact the decision to deceive.