Paper Title
Covid-19 Vaccination and Subsequent Dishonest Behavior: Experimental Evidence

Abstract
As of the beginning of 2021, the State of Israel, with a population of 9.3 million, had administered more COVID-19 vaccine doses than all countries aside from China, the US, and the UK. Moreover, Israel had administered almost 11.0 doses per 100 population, while the next highest rates were 3.5 (in Bahrain) and 1.4 (in the United Kingdom). All other countries had administered less than 1 dose per 100 population (Rosen et al, 2021). The COVID-19 vaccine is administered in two doses, which are necessary to confer adequate immunity. All vaccines administered in Israel by the beginning of 2021 were manufactured by Pfeizer and BioNTech labs, which recommend that the second dose be given within 21-28 days of the first dose. The immune response to the first dose is known to be relatively weak, but the second dose is said to provide 95 percent protection against the disease. Vaccinated individuals receive a vaccination certificate and enjoy more freedom than those who opt to avoid the vaccine, such as exemption from mandatory isolation in a coronavirus hotel when returning to the country from abroad or entry to shopping centers, restaurants, fitness clubs and cultural events. Hypothesizing that the sense of freedom, and presumably optimism, engendered by the vaccines may spill over to other areas, the present paper connects between the coronavirus vaccination and dishonest behavior. Over the past decade, with the growing appeal of experimental techniques, behavioral economists and social psychologists have been designing numerous lab and field experiments with the purpose of deriving insights on people’s dishonest behavior, incentivizing subjects with monetary payoffs. While there is a wide variety of dishonesty experiments reported in the literature, the most prominent genre involves a simple task performed by participants in privacy, such as flipping a coin (e.g., Bucciol and Piovesan, 2011), rolling a die (e.g., Fischbacher and Foellmi-Heusi, 2013) or finding pairs of numbers that add up to 10 in as many matrices as possible (e.g., Mazar et al, 2008), the outcome of which they are requested to honestly self-report. Other genres of honesty experiments include sender-receiver games where senders may convey deceptive messages to receivers under conditions of asymmetric information (e.g. Gneezy, 2005), dropping wallets or cash envelopes in public places to examine the return rates (West, 2005) and handing cash-paying customers, such as restaurant diners, excessive change to elucidate their tendency to return the undeserved amount (Azar et al, 2013). The present paper reports the results of a field experiment designed to examine the hypothesis that the Covid-19 vaccination stimulates subsequent dishonest behavior. Specifically, incentivizing people’s dishonesty with monetary payoffs, we hypothesized that (a) people vaccinated with the first dose of the vaccine are more likely to subsequently lie than people who have not yet taken the vaccine and (b) people vaccinated with the second dose of the vaccine are more likely to lie than people vaccinated with the first dose or people who have not yet taken the vaccine. The experiment’s results weakly support the first hypothesis but strongly support the second. An emotion questionnaire filled out by subjects suggests that the COVID-19 vaccination influences people’s moral behavior through positive emotional priming.