A recent experimental literature shows that truth-telling is not always motivated by pecuniary motives, and several alternative motivations have been proposed. However, their relative importance in any given context is still not totally clear. This paper investigates the relevance of pure lie aversion, that is, a dislike for lies independent of their consequences. We propose a very simple desig...

OBJECTIVES To investigate the incidence and solution of ethical dilemmas in a palliative care unit. DESIGN Health care workers recorded daily all dilemmas in caring for each patient. SETTING Palliative care unit of National Taiwan University Hospital in Taiwan. PATIENTS Two hundred and forty-six consecutive patients with terminal cancer during 1997-8. MAIN MEASUREMENT Ethical dilemmas i...

Copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proofs will be undertaken on this manuscript before final publication. During production and pre-press, errors may be discovered that could affect the content. Abstract The cognitive view on deception proposes that lying comes with a cognitive cost. This view is supported by the finding that lying typically takes longer than truth telling. E...

This analysis challenges the medical malpractice findings of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform (“Commission”) in its December 2010 report “The Moment of Truth.” Specifically, we reject its assertion in section 3.3.12 that taking away the legal rights of injured patients would “save $2 billion in 2015, $17 billion through 2020.” We find that the Commission’s proposal wo...

Gillon discusses the conflicting moral implications of the principles of respect for autonomy and of beneficence and non-maleficence when telling patients the truth about their illnesses and treatments. The case for nondisclosure is usually based on three major arguments: that doctors' Hippocratic obligations to benefit and not harm their patients take precedence over not deceiving them; that...

We conduct a laboratory experiment with a constant-sum sender-receiver game to investigate the impact of individuals’ firstand second-order beliefs on truth-telling. While senders are more likely to lie if they expect the receiver to trust their message (which is in line with expected payoff maximization), they are also more likely to tell the truth if they believe the receiver expects them to ...