Appetite, rationality, and honesty?

Classic economic models generally depend on the assumption that a decision maker is purely rational, and therefore should decide what is in their own best interest. However, for choices in real life, decisions often do not follow what rational models would predict. In this study, a classroom experiment was conducted to explore whether it is possible to find a relation between a stimulus designed to increase the level of appetite and the likelihood for respondents to lie in a setup where dishonesty would increase their expected reward. Over four sessions, the participants were assigned to either a treatment or control group, where the treatment group had an alternative set of instructions, providing them with the prospect of food as a reward as opposed to the control group, who also had the prospect of a reward but for whom the reward was not specified. To incentivise the commitment of the participants, a reward was randomly awarded to two respondents after the sessions based on the participant’s answers. The results of this experiment did not show any significant effect supporting the hypothesis.