Truth Telling Under Oath Jacquemet, Nicolas; Luchini, Stephane; Rosaz, Julie ...
Management science,
01/2019, Volume:
65, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Oath taking for senior executives has been promoted as a means to enhance honesty within and toward organizations. Herein we explore whether people who voluntarily sign a solemn truth-telling oath ...are more committed to sincere behavior when offered the chance to lie. We design an experiment to test how the oath affects truth telling in two contexts: a neutral context replicating the typical experiment in the literature, and a “loaded” context in which we remind subjects that “a lie is a lie.” We consider four payoff configurations, with differential monetary incentives to lie, implemented as within-subjects treatment variables. The results are reinforced by robustness investigations in which each subject made only one lying decision. Our results show that the oath reduces lying, especially in the loaded environment—falsehoods are reduced by 50%. The oath, however, has a weaker effect on lying in the neutral environment. The oath did affect decision times in all instances: the average person takes significantly more time deciding whether to lie under oath.
This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.
The global financial crisis has led to a surprising interest in professional oaths in business. Examples are the MBA Oath (Harvard Business School), the Economist's Oath (George DeMartino) and the ...Dutch Banker's Oath, which senior executives in the financial services industry in the Netherlands have been obliged to swear since 2010. This paper is among the first to consider oaths from the perspective of business ethics. A framework is presented for analysing oaths in terms of their form, their content and the specific contribution they make to business ethics management: oaths may foster professionalism, facilitate moral deliberation and enhance compliance. This framework is used to analyse and evaluate the MBA Oath, the Economist's Oath and the Banker's Oath as well as various other similar initiatives.
ABSTRACT
We study the effect of executives’ pledges of integrity on firms’ financial reporting outcomes by exploiting a 2016 regulation that requires holders of Dutch professional accounting degrees ...to pledge an integrity oath. We identify chief executive officers (CEOs) and chief financial officers (CFOs) required to take the integrity oath and find that firms reduce income-increasing discretionary accruals after executives took the oath. These firms also reduce discretionary expenditures, indicating that oath-taking executives reduce overall earnings management and do not merely substitute accruals-based with real-activities earnings management. These effects are concentrated in firms where the CFO took the oath. Overall, our results indicate that integrity oaths for executives improve firms’ financial reporting quality.
Data Availability: Data are available from the public sources cited in the text.
JEL Classifications: M40; M41.
This volume compares the courtroom oaths of both Islamic and modern Egyptian legal systems, blending elements of legal history, comparative law, theology, philosophy and culture.
The practice of making oaths comes from ancient times, a tradition common to virtually all peoples and cultures. Recent calls for ethics reform have included questions about how or whether these ...declarations are honored. In the fraught politics of today’s secularized, pluralistic society, skepticism about oaths may be tempting, but it is insufficient as the topic deserves critical reflection. This study assesses the efficacy of oaths of office by examining them using intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual transcendental values that define excellence. The analysis offers recommendations to reinforce the significance of this once-venerable bond between the populace and public servants.
Or break it Bruce, ALexander M.
Mythlore,
09/2023, Volume:
42, Issue:
1(143)
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
As much as J. R. R. Tolkien valued the heroism expressed in "The Battle of Maldon," with its record of warriors who died to maintain their oath, he challenged the notion of utter adherence to a sworn ...oath in The Silmarillion. The over-arching narrative of The Silmarillion tells of Feanor and his seven sons who swear an oath to reclaim the three Silmarils from any "Vala, Demon, Elf or Man as yet unborn, or any creature, great or small, good or evil, that time should bring forth unto the end of days, whoso should hold or take or keep a Silmaril from their possession" (Silmarillion 83). The extended story ultimately highlights the bitter regret that can come from seeking to fulfill an oath that, the more it is pursued, the more harm is done. As such, we can better understand the perspective of Elrond in The Lord of the Rings, as Elrond saw first-hand the ultimate end of the oath of Feanor: in language reminiscent of the Old English poem "The Wanderer," Elrond observes that efforts not to break an oath can break one's heart instead.
This research is meant to describe : (i) Various synonyms of the word oath in Madani surahs (2) The importance or the usage of the word oath and its synonyms in Madani surahs (3) The contexts of the ...word oath and its synonyms in Madani surahs. The research methodology used is qualitative descriptive. The results of the research are as follows : (1) There are 7 words as synonyms of the word oath in Madaniah surahs. They are aqsama and yuqsimu, halafa and yahlifuna, special oath fala warabbika, nabtahil, yu'luna and ya'tali, syahadatin billahi and aiman. (2) In Madani surahs, the researcher finds that there are four function of the word oath and their synonyms, namely to throw away doubt, to strengthen the reason, to strengthen the statement and to define the law perfectly. (3) The contexts used to distinguish the word oath and its synonyms are linguistic and non-linguistic (situation) contexts
People feel committed to other individuals, groups, organizations, or moral norms in many contexts of everyday life. Such social commitment can lead to positive outcomes, such as increased job ...satisfaction or relationship longevity; yet, there can also be detrimental effects to feeling committed. Recent high-profile cases of fraud or corruption in companies like Enron or Volkswagen are likely influenced by strong commitment to the organization or coworkers. Although social commitment might increase dishonest behavior, there is little systematic knowledge about when and how this may occur. In the present project, we reviewed 20,988 articles, focusing on studies that experimentally manipulated social commitment and measured dishonest behavior. We retained 445 effect sizes from 121 articles featuring a total of 91,683 participants across 33 countries. We found no evidence that social commitment increases or reduces dishonest behavior in general. Nonetheless, we did find evidence that the effect strongly depends on the target of the commitment. Feeling committed to other individuals or groups reduces honest behavior (g = −0.17 −0.24, −0.11), whereas feeling committed to honesty norms through honesty oaths or pledges increases honest behavior (g = 0.27 0.19, 0.36). The analysis identified several moderating variables and detected some degree of publication bias across effects. Our findings highlight the diverging effects of different forms of social commitment on dishonest behavior and suggest a combination of the different forms of commitment could be a possible means to combat corruption and dishonest behavior in the organizational context.
Public Significance Statement
This meta-analysis reveals that social commitment can impact dishonest behavior in various ways. Feeling committed or interacting with other individuals showed an increase in dishonesty, whereas committing to an honesty norm (by signing an honesty oath, for example) showed an increase in honesty. These effects were small and subject to different situational moderations. We propose that a combination of both types of commitment, commitment to loyalty and commitment to honesty norms, might be important in achieving good teamwork while at the same time reducing dishonest behavior.
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