The relationship between attention allocation and cheating

Temptation shapes dishonesty and can alter working memory

This study shows that participants tend to remember an ambiguous, directional cue as biased towards stimuli associated with a high reward that can be attained dishonestly. Participants saw eight digits presented in a circular arrangement. On some trials, they were asked to report the digit (“Target Digit”) indicated by a jittery cue that was slightly biased in the direction of another digit (“Second Cued Digit”), which was either higher or lower than the Target Digit. Participants were paid based on the reported digit (higher digits meant higher pay) and not based on the accuracy of their report. In this setting, they could make self-serving mistakes by dishonestly reporting the Second Cued Digit when it was higher than the Target Digit. Replicating prior work, participants frequently made such self-serving mistakes. On other trials, after the digits disappeared, participants were asked to reproduce the direction of the jittery cue, without receiving any pay. Results showed that that participants’ reports of the cue were more biased toward high-rewarding digits than low-rewarding digits. This research provides preliminary evidence of a link between attention, dishonesty, and memory, offering an important constraint for theories in behavioral ethics.

Cognitive strategies for managing cheating: The roles of cognitive abilities in managing moral shortcuts

Cheating and immorality are highly researched phenomena, likely due to their great impact. However, little research has examined the real-time cognitive mechanisms that are involved in cheating and conflict management. Much of the cheating research to date concentrates on binary cheating; however, in more prevalent real-world scenarios, people often engage in more ambiguous self-serving mistakes. To execute such self-serving decisions, one may make use of conflict-management strategies to help balance an internal struggle between gain and self-concept. We propose that to enact such strategies one must employ sufficient cognitive resources. To test this, we employed a simple effortful control task that allows for comparisons of gain and no-gain errors, isolating self-serving mistakes while recording gaze and response-time measures. Findings revealed that individuals can make use of conflict management strategies that mimicked errors made inadvertently. Two strategies included gaze avert and quick response times during gain blocks, whereby participants simulated out-of-control-like behaviors while engaging in self-serving mistakes, plausibly as a method of self-justification. Strategy use was dependent upon individuals' cognitive abilities. Participants reporting high inhibitory control abilities were able to use gaze aversion to engage in self-serving mistakes, while those reporting high attention resources were able to employ faster response times when making more profitable errors. Taken together, this paper contributes to (1) the debate on whether honesty/dishonesty is the dominant response, (2) the debate on self-control and inhibition on cheating, and (3) the understudied area of cognitive justifications to maintain a positive self-concept.

Oculomotor behavior tracks the effect of ideological priming on deception

The decision to lie to another person involves a conflict between one's own and others' interest. Political ideology may foster self-promoting or self-transcending values and thus may balance or fuel self vs. other related conflicts. Here, we explored in politically non-aligned participants whether oculomotor behavior may index the influence on moral decision-making of prime stimuli related to left and right-wing ideologies. We presented pictures of Italian politicians and ideological words in a paradigm where participants could lie to opponents with high vs. low socio-economic status to obtain a monetary reward. Results show that left-wing words decreased self-gain lies and increased other-gain ones. Oculomotor behavior revealed that gazing longer at politicians' pictures led participants to look longer at opponent's status-related information than at game's outcome-related information before the decision. This, in turn, caused participants to lie less to low status opponents. Moreover, after lying, participants averted their gaze from high status opponents and maintained it towards low status ones. Our results offer novel evidence that ideological priming influences moral decision-making and suggest that oculomotor behavior may provide crucial insights on how this process takes place.

Omission and Compromise: The Sacredness of Moral Foundations in Political Groups in Italy

Sacred values are moral foundations that may make public and political debates among groups hard to resolve. A taboo trade-off framework offers the opportunity of measuring the inviolability and the "sacralization" of moral foundations. In this study, moral foundations in a taboo trade-off framework were assessed in a convenience sample of Italians (N = 224) using a new measure to assess sacred values, the Omission as a Compromise on Moral Foundations scale (OC-MF). The OC-MF measures the willingness of individuals to omit moral foundations in exchange for money. It was predicted that Italian center and left-wing participants would be less willing to compromise individualizing moral foundations as opposed to binding ones, and that center and right-wing participants would be less willing to compromise on binding moral foundations than left-wing participants. Confirmatory Factor Analyses demonstrated the two-factor structure of the OC-MF: individualizing and binding. As predicted, Repeated Measures Anova showed that political orientation was related with differential adoptions of moral foundations as sacred values, with center and left-wing participants refusing to compromise more on individualizing than on binding moral foundations. Moreover, left-wing participants were more willing to compromise on binding moral foundations than center and right-wing participants. The OC-MF shows the hypothesized differences between Italian political groups and offers a new understanding of moral reasoning. These findings provide opportunities for improving ideological debates concerning sacred values.

Visual saliency influences ethical blind spots and (dis)honesty

Recent work suggests that dishonesty results from ethical blind spots: people’s lack of attention to ethical information. In two experiments (one pre-registered) we used eye tracking to investigate when ethical blind spots emerge, and whether they can be reduced through a simple, non-invasive intervention. Participants reported a Target Digit indicated by a jittery cue that was slightly biased in the direction of another digit (the Second-Cued Digit), which could be either higher or lower than the Target Digit. Participants were paid more for reporting higher digits, and were not penalized for making mistakes, thus providing an incentive to cheat. Results showed that participants frequently made self-serving (and rarely self-hurting) mistakes by reporting the Second-Cued Digit when it was more valuable than the target. Importantly, they rapidly gazed at the digit that they would later report, regardless of whether this report was correct or a self-serving mistake. Finally, we were able to reduce or increase the number of self-serving mistakes by respectively increasing or reducing the visual saliency of the Target Digit. We suggest that increasing the visual saliency of morally desirable options is a promising cost-effective tool to curb dishonesty.

Cheating behavior in children: Integrating gaze allocation and social awareness

Children's cheating and factors supporting honesty are not well understood. The current work explored variables involved in children's cheating through eye-tracking and an implicit manipulation in which extrinsic awareness of the effects of one's behaviors on others was primed. Participants played a computer game with the option for a monetary gain in which they could earn more if they selectively erred in response to more profitable stimuli. Results show that children cheat by making selective effort toward more profitable errors; however, extrinsic awareness inhibits these cheating behaviors. Importantly, gaze toward children's earnings mediates this relationship, suggesting that extrinsic awareness mitigates an impulsive looking pattern, which in turn results in less cheating. Findings suggest that an implicit manipulation, highlighting the potential implications of one's actions for others, seems to effectively suppress cheating among children. Furthermore, attention toward earnings offers a cognitive process that acts to mediate the effect of this manipulation on cheating. Taken together, this framework suggests psychoneurocognitive and social processes that influence cheating in children, offering a direction for future implicit intervention techniques to support honest performance.

Moral Reminders Do Not Reduce Symptom Over-Reporting Tendencies

Is presenting patients with moral reminders prior to psychological testing a fruitful deterrence strategy for symptom over-reporting? We addressed this question in three ways. In study 1, we presented individuals seeking treatment for ADHD complaints (n = 24) with moral primes using the Mother Teresa Questionnaire and compared their scores on an index of symptom over-reporting (i.e., the Structured Inventory of Malingered Symptomatology, SIMS) with those of unprimed patient controls (n = 27). Moral primes slightly decreased SIMS scores, but the effect was not significant. In study 2, we took a different approach to activate moral categories: we recruited individuals seeking treatment for ADHD complaints and asked some of them to sign a moral contract (i.e., prime; n = 19) declaring that they would complete the tests in an honest way and compared their scores on the SIMS and standard clinical scales measuring self-reported psychopathology with those of unprimed patient controls (n = 17). Again, we found no convincing evidence that moral cues suppress symptom over-reporting. In study 3, we gave individuals from the general population (N = 132) positive, negative, or neutral moral primes and implicitly induced them to feign symptoms, after which they completed a brief validated version of the SIMS and an adapted version of the b Test (i.e., an underperformance measure). Again, primes did not affect over-reporting tendencies. Taken together, our findings illustrate that moral reminders are not going to be useful in clinical practice. Rather, they point towards the importance of studying contextual and individual difference factors that guide moral decision-making in patients and may be modified to discourage symptom over-reporting.

Emotional intelligence buffers the effect of physiological arousal on dishonesty

We studied the emotional processes that allow people to balance two competing desires: benefitting from dishonesty and keeping a positive self-image. We recorded physiological arousal (skin conductance and heart rate) during a computer card game in which participants could cheat and fail to report a certain card when presented on the screen to avoid losing their money. We found that higher skin conductance corresponded to lower cheating rates. Importantly, emotional intelligence regulated this effect; participants with high emotional intelligence were less affected by their physiological reactions than those with low emotional intelligence. As a result, they were more likely to profit from dishonesty. However, no interaction emerged between heart rate and emotional intelligence. We suggest that the ability to manage and control emotions can allow people to overcome the tension between doing right or wrong and license them to bend the rules.

It’s About Time

Organizational scholars have grown increasingly aware of the importance of capturing phenomenon at the within-person level of analysis in order to test many organizational behavior theories involving emotions, motivation, performance, and interpersonal processes, to name a few. Experience sampling methodology (ESM) and diary-based procedures provide data that better match many dynamic organizational theories by measuring constructs repeatedly across events or days, providing an inter-episodic understanding of phenomena. In this article, we argue for the value of another measurement procedure that also adopts a repeated measures approach but does so by continuously measuring psychological processes without any gaps over relatively short timeframes. More specifically, we suggest that continuous rating assessments (CRA) can serve as a tool that enables the measurement of dynamic intra-episodic processes that unfold over the course of events, enabling precise determination of how, when, and in what way constructs change and influence each other over time. We provide an overview of this methodology, discuss its applicability to understanding time-based phenomena, and illustrate how this technique can provide new insight into dynamic processes using an empirical example.