Evidence for Intergroup Bias in Coalitional but not Selfish Dishonesty

People often claim that lying is wrong regardless of whom it helps or harms. Yet in everyday life, dishonesty can serve group interests—protecting allies, advancing teams, or harming rivals. This raises a fundamental question: Is the moral cost of lying fixed, or is it shaped by social identity? Across three experiments, U.S. Democrat and Republican voters (N=5,230) could lie anonymously to double their own or another participant’s earnings. For selfish dishonesty (Experiment 1), people lied equally regardless of whether it harmed their ingroup or outgroup. However, for coalitional dishonesty (Experiment 2)—lying without benefitting personally—people lied 9 percentage-points more to benefit ingroup than outgroup members. Experiment 3 replicated these findings and revealed that people overestimated outgroup dishonesty more than ingroup dishonesty. Experiment 4 (N=866) identified coalitional dishonesty in workplace scenarios. Thus, dishonesty is not only about self-interest versus fixed morality; it is also shaped by selfless group-serving motives.