Toronto - The temptation is always there: include every last bit of income you earned last year on your tax return -- or not?
New research has found that we're more likely to do the right thing in situations of moral conflict when it requires little to no effort. If income information is automatically entered into our tax return, we may be less likely to alter it to something that is incorrect once it's there.
However, the passive response can promote cheating, too. When faced with a blank return, we may conveniently "forget" to fill in those bothersome boxes for things like extra money made on investments, which might push our taxes higher.
Nina Mažar is an Associate Professor of Marketing at University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management where she is also a member of the Behavioural Economics in Action Research Cluster. Currently she is the Behavioral Scientist of the World Bank's new GINI - Global Insights Initiative.
Her academic research focuses on behavioral economics, with a particular interest on how human behavior is influenced by seemingly irrelevant cues in the environment, and how to re-design the environment to nudge individuals to make better decisions that increase their own and societal welfare. Her research has been published widely in academic journals, and featured in international TV, radio, and print outlets, including NPR, BBC, The New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, and Harvard Business Review's Breakthrough Ideas. Mažar was a post-doctoral associate at MIT, where she researched and lectured in the Sloan School of Management and the eRationality group of the Media Lab. Credit: NIna Mažar
"We don't think there is one solution for all situations in which you are tempted to be dishonest, but we definitely know from prior research that people tend to accept the status quo," said researcher Nina Ma