Men typically express more willingness than women to perpetrate fraudulent acts like lying in negotiations. However, women express just as much willingness in some cases. We develop and test a theory to explain these mixed findings. Specifically, we hypothesize that situational cues that bring about competitive or empathic feelings mitigate sex differences in lying to negotiation counterparts. Results from four experiments confirm our hypotheses. Experiment 1 showed that men and women express equal willingness to lie when negotiating with counterparts toward whom they felt either great competitiveness or empathy. Experiment 2 extended these results by confirming that men only express more willingness to lie absent competitive or empathic feelings towards a counterpart. Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrated that inducing competitive or empathic feelings toward a counterpart eliminated sex differences in lying by leading women to lie more and men to lie less, respectively. Overall, our results suggest that the extent to which negotiators experience competitive or empathic feelings play important roles in whether sex differences in lying in negotiations emerge.

男人通常比女人更愿意进行欺诈行为，例如躺在谈判中。但是，在某些情况下，女性也表达了同样的意愿。我们开发并测试了一种理论来解释这些混杂的发现。具体来说，我们假设情境提示会引起竞争或共情，从而减轻了与谈判对方撒谎时的性别差异。四个实验的结果证实了我们的假设。实验1显示，当与与自己感到很有竞争能力或同情心的同伴进行谈判时，男人和女人都表现出同等的说谎意愿。实验2通过证实男人只表现出更大的意愿来表达对同伴的缺乏竞争或同理心的感觉，从而扩展了这些结果。实验3和4证明，通过诱导对同伴的竞争或同理心的感觉，消除了说谎中的性别差异，分别导致女性多撒谎和男人少撒谎。总体而言，我们的结果表明，谈判者在经历竞争或共情时所经历的程度在谈判中是否出现性别差异方面起着重要作用。