Honesty in Virtual Communication

Remote work arrangements and increased virtual communication are commonplace. Particularly in organizations, virtual communication has become an essential tool for collaboration and exchanging information. Virtual communication channels, such as text or video messages, provide different levels of human presence compared to face-to-face communication. Given that human presence is known to impact moral behavior, this raises the question if different communication channels are used when being dishonest. To investigate this question, we conducted a controlled experiment using a sender-receiver deception game where the senders could choose between a text or a video message. In the baseline condition, the senders had to be honest and were not allowed to lie. In the treatment condition, the senders had the option of sending an honest or a dishonest message to the receivers. Even though we observe no differences in channel choice if we compare the two treatments, our results, however, show that in the treatment condition, the senders chose the text communication channel significantly more often when being dishonest compared to being honest. We discuss different potential mechanisms, such as differences in perceived human presence between text and video communication, for our findings. Our findings have important implications for various contexts and for strategies to prevent dishonest behavior.