Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-2026

Journal Title

European Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

ISSN

2004-8556

DOI

10.62355/ejels.51874

Abstract

We investigate whether people’s moral judgments of lies in pre-contractual negotiations differ from their views on whether such lies should give the deceived party a legal right to rescind the contract, and whether these judgments depend on the content of the lie. In a vignette study with 832 German students and 885 participants from Germany, Italy, and the United States, respondents evaluated a range of common negotiation lies. Across samples, participants were generally more likely to deem a lie immoral than to believe it should justify rescission, but the size of this gap varied depending on the lie’s subject. Lies about the subject matter of the contract or the reservation price tended to elicit similar moral and legal assessments. In contrast, lies about product availability or alternative offers were frequently judged immoral yet not seen as warranting rescission. These findings contribute to psychological research on normative beliefs and inform legal debates about the normative foundations of contract law.

First Page

1

Last Page

22

Num Pages

22

Volume Number

2

Issue Number

3

Publisher

European Society for Empirical Legal Studies

Rights

Copyright (c) 2026 Stefanie Jung, Peter Krebs, Monika Leszczynska Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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PDF

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