News flash! Politicians lie.
Ok, maybe that’s not the most shocking news headline in the world – but the fact that a new study confirming that lying can actually benefit politicians in getting re-elected should send chills down your spine.
Published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, the study, published in 2020, carried out by a team at Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona – asked 816 mayors across Spain to flip a coin and record which side it landed on.
The catch was that if it landed on heads, they would receive their results but if it landed on tails, they wouldn’t.
Statistically, around half of the mayors should’ve recorded tails and the other half heads but that wasn’t the case at all.
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Mayors reported that around 68% of them had seen the coins land on their heads.
The study concluded: “Because the probability of heads is known, we can estimate the proportion of mayors who lied to obtain the report. We find that a large and statistically significant proportion of mayors lied.”
Further analysis of the results revealed that the men and women were equally likely to lie when they were associated with the major political parties.
It found that it was a “negative relationship between truth-telling and re-election”They came to the following conclusion: “Suggests that dishonesty might help politicians survive in office.”
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