The Impact of Childhood Memories on Cheating Behavior

The study examines the effect of childhood memories on misreporting behavior in the strategic context of an ultimatum game with asymmetric information. It employs an online experiment in which individuals are given the opportunity to misreport a sum of money. Findings indicate that, when positive childhood memories are evoked compared to recent neutral memories, people are less likely to misreport the sum of money they were given. However, the magnitude of the effect does not appear to have a difference across genders and different age categories. Overall, the results emphasize the need for exploring the influence of childhood memories in more contexts.