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Lying for Good? | Campaign

Lying for Good?

Mika GuzikevitsMika Guzikevits feels at home at Hebrew University – and rightly so. She’s been here for a while. She has under her belt a dual bachelor’s degree in psychology and business administration, one master’s degree in social psychology, another in business administration, and now she’s working on her doctorate in business administration.

Mika is fascinated by one particular intersection between these two fields: the social aspects of deception. As an undergraduate student, she began working in Prof. Anat Maril’s neurocognition lab, which fostered her sense of belonging to an academic community. Towards the end of her studies, she took a course on negotiations, taught by Prof. Shoham Choshen-Hillel, whose expertise includes judgment and decision-making. They began chatting, and Prof. Choshen-Hillel invited Mika to attend her lab’s weekly meetings to get a sense of the field and lab life. Mika gladly accepted and soon began working on a master’s degree under Prof. Choshen-Hillel’s guidance.

Mika’s research examined the difference in moral judgment between selfish lies (self-serving) and pro-social lies (serving others). She looked at how different liars expect to be judged and how moral, benevolent, and trustworthy they are, in fact, judged to be. Using online crowdsourcing platforms, Mika collected real lies and disseminated questionnaires. Responses started flowing in, and her data showed that pro-social liars were judged more favorably than selfish liars. These findings may indicate that people feel they have a license to lie, and thus engage in unethical and corrupt behavior.

By this point, Mika couldn’t cram a single extra data point into her thesis. She decided to broaden her research question and take it to the next level. Today, Mika is a second-year doctoral student at the Jerusalem Business School and the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality. Her research asks how the perceived “advantages” of being a pro-social liar affect people’s behavior. Will people lie more? She continues to use online questionnaires and has expanded her methods to include experiments, both in the lab and the field.

“The Jerusalem Business School offers a unique, interdisciplinary, and intimate academic experience – a great place to pursue doctoral studies.”

 

Photograph by Maxim Dinshtein