Image Motives Drive Lying Behavior Independent of Financial Incentives: Experimental Evidence from Strength, Preference, and President Rating Tasks

The extensive behavioral economics and social psychology literature on lying has focused almost exclusively on experimental settings in which individuals lie for financial gain. However, in everyday life, people frequently lie to enhance their social and self‑image – perhaps even more often than they lie to gain monetary advantage. In this paper, we introduce three experiments – conducted both in the laboratory and online – in which participants may lie about their physical strength, their preferences for everyday items, or their favorite U.S. President. Using these experiments, we examine how the willingness to present a desirable social or self‑image (or to avoid an undesirable one) influences lying behavior. Our results demonstrate that image concerns significantly affect the decision to lie: they increase lying even when no financial incentive is present, and they promote truth‑telling when lying would yield monetary gain but threaten one’s image.