Cognitive control and socially desirable behavior: The role of interpersonal impact

“No Chit Chat!” A Warning From a Physical Versus Virtual Robot Invigilator: Which Matters Most?

Past work has not considered social robots as proctors or monitors to prevent cheating or maintain discipline in the context of exam invigilation with adults. Further, we do not see an investigation into the role of invigilation for the robot presented in two different embodiments (physical vs. virtual). We demonstrate a system that enables a robot (physical and virtual) to act as an invigilator and deploy an exam setup with two participants completing a programming task. We conducted two studies (an online video-based survey and an in-person evaluation) to understand participants’ perceptions of the invigilator robot presented in two different embodiments. Additionally, we investigated whether participants showed cheating behaviours in one condition more than the other. The findings showed that participants’ ratings did not differ significantly. Further, participants were more talkative in the virtual robot condition compared to the physical robot condition. These findings are promising and call for further research into the invigilation role of social robots in more subtle and complex exam-like settings.

Cognitive control and dishonesty

Dishonesty is ubiquitous and imposes substantial financial and social burdens on society. Intuitively, dishonesty results from a failure of willpower to control selfish behavior. However, recent research suggests that the role of cognitive control in dishonesty is more complex. We review evidence that cognitive control is not needed to be honest or dishonest per se, but that it depends on individual differences in what we call one's 'moral default': for those who are prone to dishonesty, cognitive control indeed aids in being honest, but for those who are already generally honest, cognitive control may help them cheat to occasionally profit from small acts of dishonesty. Thus, the role of cognitive control in (dis)honesty is to override the moral default.

The developmental origins of a default moral response: A shift from honesty to dishonesty

People are sometimes tempted to lie for their own benefit if it would not harm others. For adults, dishonesty is the default response in these circumstances. The developmental origins of this phenomenon were investigated between 2019 and 2021 among 6- to 11-year-old Han Chinese children from China (N = 548, 49% female). Children had an opportunity to win prizes in a behavioral economics game (Experiment 1) or a temptation resistance game adapted from developmental psychology (Experiment 2). In each experiment, the youngest children showed a default tendency of honesty and there was an overall age-related shift toward a default tendency of dishonesty. These findings provide direct evidence of developmental change in the automatic and controlled processes that underlie moral behavior.

Influence of Ego Depletion on Individual Forgiveness in Different Interpersonal Offense Situations

Forgiveness, as an important content in the field of morality, means that the offended person overcomes the negative emotion, cognition, and behavior toward the offender and replaces it with positive emotion, cognition, and behavior. Based on the theory of the limitation of psychological resources, ego depletion (ED) will lead to the weakening of self-regulation function, thus making some immoral behaviors, which is not conducive to individual forgiveness. In order to explore the influence of ED on individual forgiveness in different interpersonal offense situations, this study used the Stroop task to manipulate the level of ED and used imaginary situations to distinguish offending situations. We found that the level of forgiveness in a serious offense situation was significantly lower than that in a mild offense situation, p < 0.001, partial η² = 0.158. In different interpersonal offense situations, ED has different effects on forgiveness. In the severe offense situation, the forgiveness level of high-ED individuals was significantly lower than that of the low-ED individuals, p = 0.023, partial η² = 0.144; in the mild offense situation, the forgiveness level of high-ED individuals was significantly higher than that of low-ED individuals, p = 0.029, partial η² = 0.140. The results showed that different levels of ED have no consistent effect on forgiveness in different interpersonal offense situations; high ED hinders individual forgiveness in serious offense situations but can promote individual forgiveness in mild offense situations.

The Difference Spotting Task: A new nonverbal measure of cheating behavior

To understand when, how, and why people cheat, the ability to detect cheating in a laboratory setting is crucial. However, commonly used paradigms are confronted with a conflict between allowing participants to believe they can cheat unnoticed and allowing experimenters to detect cheating. This project aimed to develop and establish a new nonverbal task to resolve this conflict. Study 1 and Study 2 developed a new unsolvable paradigm called the Difference Spotting Task. In Study 1, participants were incentivized to indicate whether they found any difference between a pair of pictures without being asked to point the difference(s) out, so they could overreport their performance to earn extra money. Unbeknownst to them, the pairs of pictures from half of the items were identical so that the task could not be solved without cheating. This paradigm allowed experimenters to detect cheating for each unsolvable item. Study 3 examined the validity of the Difference Spotting Task and demonstrated it as a valid tool to assess cheating. The Difference Spotting Task is nonverbal and thus applicable to populations across age, educational level, and culture. In this unsolvable task, participants feel safe in cheating, and experimenters can detect cheating at the item level. The task holds the potential to gain acceptance by many researchers and facilitate the investigation of the underlying processes of cheating behavior.

Intuitive Honesty Versus Dishonesty: Meta-Analytic Evidence

Is self-serving lying intuitive? Or does honesty come naturally? Many experiments have manipulated reliance on intuition in behavioral-dishonesty tasks, with mixed results. We present two meta-analyses (with evidential value) testing whether an intuitive mind-set affects the proportion of liars (k = 73; n = 12,711) and the magnitude of lying (k = 50; n = 6,473). The results indicate that when dishonesty harms abstract others, promoting intuition causes more people to lie, log odds ratio = 0.38, p = .0004, and people to lie more, Hedges's g = 0.26, p < .0001. However, when dishonesty inflicts harm on concrete others, promoting intuition has no significant effect on dishonesty (p > .63). We propose one potential explanation: The intuitive appeal of prosociality may cancel out the intuitive selfish appeal of dishonesty, suggesting that the social consequences of lying could be a promising key to the riddle of intuition's role in honesty. We discuss limitations such as the relatively unbalanced distribution of studies using concrete versus abstract victims and the overall large interstudy heterogeneity.

Honesty Speaks a Second Language

Theories of dishonest behavior implicitly assume language independence. Here, we investigated this assumption by comparing lying by people using a foreign language versus their native tongue. Participants rolled a die and were paid according to the outcome they reported. Because the outcome was private, they could lie to inflate their profit without risk of repercussions. Participants performed the task either in their native language or in a foreign language. With native speakers of Hebrew, Korean, Spanish, and English, we discovered that, on average, people inflate their earnings less when they use a foreign language. The outcome is explained by a dual system account that suggests that self-serving dishonesty is an automatic tendency, which is supported by a fast and intuitive system. Because using a foreign language is less intuitive and automatic, it might engage more deliberation and reduce the temptation to lie. These findings challenge theories of ethical behavior to account for the role of the language in shaping ethical behavior.

Fairness, fast and slow: A review of dual process models of fairness

Fairness, the notion that people deserve or have rights to certain resources or kinds of treatment, is a fundamental dimension of moral cognition. Drawing on recent evidence from economics, psychology, and neuroscience, we ask whether self-interest is always intuitive, requiring self-control to override with reasoning-based fairness concerns, or whether fairness itself can be intuitive. While we find strong support for rejecting the notion that self-interest is always intuitive, the literature has reached conflicting conclusions about the neurocognitive systems underpinning fairness. We propose that this disagreement can largely be resolved in light of an extended Social Heuristics Hypothesis. Divergent findings may be attributed to the interpretation of behavioral effects of ego depletion or neurostimulation, reverse inference from brain activity to the underlying psychological process, and insensitivity to social context and inter-individual differences. To better dissect the neurobiological basis of fairness, we outline how future research should embrace cross-disciplinary methods that combine psychological manipulations with neuroimaging, and that can probe inter-individual, and cultural heterogeneities.

The Impact of Social Pressure and Monetary Incentive on Cognitive Control

We compare the effects of two prominent organizational control mechanisms-social pressure and monetary incentive-on cognitive control. Cognitive control underlies the human ability to regulate thoughts and actions in the pursuit of behavioral goals. Previous studies show that monetary incentives can contribute to goal-oriented behavior by activating proactive control. There is, however, much less evidence of how social pressure affects cognitive control and task performance. In a within-subject experimental design, we tested 47 subjects performing the AX-CPT task to compare the activation of cognitive control modes under social pressure and monetary incentive beyond mere instructions to perform better. Our results indicate that instructing participants to improve their performance on its own leads to a significant shift from a reactive to a proactive control mode and that both social pressure and monetary incentive further enhance performance.