  The opportunity to tell a white lie (i.e., a lie that benefits another
person) generates a moral conflict between two opposite moral dictates, one
pushing towards telling always the truth and the other pushing towards helping
others. Here we study how people resolve this moral conflict. What does telling
a white lie signal about a person's pro-social tendencies? To answer this
question, we conducted a two-stage 2x2 experiment. In the first stage, we used
a Deception Game to measure aversion to telling a Pareto white lie (i.e., a lie
that helps both the liar and the listener), and aversion to telling an
altruistic white lie (i.e., a lie that helps the listener at the expense of the
liar). In the second stage we measured altruistic tendencies using a Dictator
Game and cooperative tendencies using a Prisoner's dilemma. We found three
major results: (i) both altruism and cooperation are positively correlated with
aversion to telling a Pareto white lie; (ii) both altruism and cooperation are
negatively correlated with aversion to telling an altruistic white lie; (iii)
men are more likely than women to tell an altruistic white lie, but not to tell
a Pareto white lie. Our results shed light on the moral conflit between
pro-sociality and truth-telling. In particular, the first finding suggests that
a significant proportion of people have non-distributional notions of what the
right thing to do is: irrespective of their economic consequences, they tell
the truth, they cooperate, they share their money.
