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Self-serving dishonest decisions can show facilitated cognitive dynamics

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Abstract

We use a novel task to test two competing hypotheses concerning the cognitive processes involved in dishonesty. Many existing accounts of deception imply that in order to act dishonestly one has to use cognitive control to overcome a bias toward the truth, which results in more time and effort. A recent hypothesis suggests that lying in order to serve self-interest may be a rapid, even automatic tendency taking less time than refraining from lying. In the current study, we track the action dynamics of potentially dishonest decisions to investigate the underlying cognitive processes. Participants are asked to privately predict the outcome of a virtual coin flip, report their accuracy and receive bonus credit for accurate predictions. The movements of the computer cursor toward the target answer are recorded and used to characterize the dynamics of decisions. Our results suggest that when a self-serving condition holds, decisions that have a high probability of being dishonest take less time and experience less hesitation.

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Notes

  1. These two notions of fast versus slow processes have had broad influence on social cognitive for decades (e.g., recently, see Kahneman 2011) and have also been discussed in the domain of deception by Seymour and colleagues (Seymour 2001; Seymour and Schumacher 2009).

  2. However, many theories imply the involvement of cognitive control and related resources in order to deceive, which implies more deliberative processes (see: Walczyk et al. 2003; Seymour and Schumacher 2009).

  3. The work we report here is novel enough that it is difficult to run a standard power analysis from past work. We piloted versions of this study to assess roughly the number of participants needed to obtain potential effects. We followed this study up with a replication. Though, in each, patterns of results vary, in general the findings are consistent (please see the Online Resource for a full report of the replication results).

  4. In order to maximize the feeling of anonymity, which is critical for inducing natural and unrestricted temptation to cheat, we did not ask participants for any personal information. Because we did not have prior research questions involving demographics, we did not collect any data of the sort. It is, however, worth noting that the demographics of MTurk were relatively well known (Mason and Watts 2009; Ipeirotis 2010; Suri and Watts 2011; Mason and Suri 2012).

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by an NSF BCS Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship to the third author. The work was also partly supported by NSF Grant BCS-0720322 to the second author.

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Correspondence to Maryam Tabatabaeian.

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Tabatabaeian, M., Dale, R. & Duran, N.D. Self-serving dishonest decisions can show facilitated cognitive dynamics. Cogn Process 16, 291–300 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-015-0660-6

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