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Mistakes and overconfidence in detecting lies could help lies spread. Participants in our experiments observe videos in which senders either tell the truth or lie, and are incentivized to distinguish between them. We find that participants fail to detect lies, but are overconfident about their ability to do so. We use these findings to study the determinants of sharing and its effect on lie detection, finding that even when incentivized to share truthful videos, participants are more likely to share lies. Moreover, the receivers are more likely to believe shared videos. Combined, the tendency to believe lies increases with sharing. (JEL C91, D83, D91, L82)

This paper studies lying. An agent randomly picks a number from a known distribution. She can then report any number and receive a monetary payoff based only on her report. The paper presents a model of lying costs that generates hypotheses regarding behavior. In an experiment, we find that the highest fraction of lies is from reporting the maximal outcome, but some participants do not make the maximal lie. More participants lie partially when the experimenter cannot observe their outcomes than when the experimenter can verify the observed outcome. Partial lying increases when the prior probability of the highest outcome decreases. (JEL C91, D12, D90, Z13)