What facilitates collaborative cheating in hierarchical teams, and what are its outcomes for those engaged? In two preregistered studies (N = 724), we investigated how subordinates are influenced by ...leaders signaling a willingness to engage in collaborative cheating, and how subordinates perceive such leaders. Participants performed a task in which they could either report their performance honestly, or cheat for financial gain. Each participant was assigned a leader who could choose to check the report’s veracity. In Study 1, leaders who checked less often were perceived as more moral, trustworthy, competent, and psychologically closer than leaders who checked more often. This trustworthiness bonus translated to investments in a subsequent trust game. Study 2 revealed that these relationship benefits specifically arise for collaborative cheating, compared to competitive cheating (at the leader’s expense). We conclude that collaborative cheating in subordinate–leader dyads strengthens in-group bonds, bringing people closer together and cultivating trust.
Full text
Available for:
NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Believing in conspiracy theories is a major problem, especially in the face of a pandemic, as these constitute a significant obstacle to public health policies, like the use of masks and vaccination. ...Indeed, during the COVID-19 pandemic, several ungrounded explanations regarding the origin of the virus or the effects of vaccinations have been rising, leading to vaccination hesitancy or refusal which poses as a threat to public health. Recent studies have shown that in the core of conspiracy theories lies a moral evaluation component; one that triggers a moral reasoning which reinforces the conspiracy itself. To gain a better understanding of how conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19 affect public health containment behaviors and policy support via morality-relevant variables, we analysed comprehensive data from the International Collaboration on the Social & Moral Psychology (ICSMP) of COVID-19, consisting of 49.965 participants across 67 countries. We particularly explored the mediating role of two levels of morality: individual and group-based morality. Results show that believing in conspiracy theories reduces adoption of containment health-related behaviors and policy support of public health measures, but moral identity and morality-as-cooperation significantly mediate this relationship. This means that beliefs in conspiracy theories do not simply constitute antecedents of cognitive biases or failures, nor maladaptive behaviors based on personality traits, but are morally infused and should be dealt as such. Based on our findings, we further discuss the psychological, moral, and political implications of endorsement of conspiracy theories in the era of the pandemic.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Seeing others in pain can stimulate powerful socio-emotional responses. Does it also make us more moral? In two laboratory experiments, we examined the interplay between pain observation, ...self-reported guilt and shame, subjective perceptions of pain intensity, and subsequent honest behavior. Watching a confederate perform a moderately painful (vs. non-painful) task did not affect honest behavior in a subsequent die-roll task. Independent of pain observation, there was a positive relationship between self-reported guilt proneness and shame proneness and honesty. More specifically, individuals who are more prone to feeling guilt -and to a lesser extent shame- behaved more honestly. Furthermore, we found weak support for the hypothesis that greater perceived pain (rather than objective pain) is associated with less cheating. We call for further research in the interconnections between perceived pain, guilt, shame, and moral behavior.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
A variety of joint action studies show that people tend to fall into synchronous behavior with others participating in the same task, and that such synchronization is beneficial, leading to greater ...rapport, satisfaction, and performance. It has been noted that many of these task environments require simple interactions that involve little planning of action coordination toward a shared goal. The present study utilized a complex joint construction task in which dyads were instructed to build model cars while their hand movements and heart rates were measured. Participants built these models under varying conditions, delimiting how freely they could divide labor during a build session. While hand movement synchrony was sensitive to the different tasks and outcomes, the heart rate measure did not show any effects of interpersonal synchrony. Results for hand movements show that the more participants were constrained by a particular building strategy, the greater their behavioral synchrony. Within the different conditions, the degree of synchrony was predictive of subjective satisfaction and objective product outcomes. However, in contrast to many previous findings, synchrony was negatively associated with superior products, and, depending on the constraints on the interaction, positively or negatively correlated with higher subjective satisfaction. These results show that the task context critically shapes the role of synchronization during joint action, and that in more complex tasks, not synchronization of behavior, but rather complementary types of behavior may be associated with superior task outcomes.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Individuals can experience a lack of economic resources compared to others, which we refer to as subjective experiences of economic scarcity. While such experiences have been shown to shift cognitive ...focus, attention, and decision-making, their association with human morality remains debated. We conduct a comprehensive investigation of the relationship between subjective experiences of economic scarcity, as indexed by low subjective socioeconomic status at the individual level, and income inequality at the national level, and various self-reported measures linked to morality. In a pre-registered study, we analyze data from a large, cross-national survey (N = 50,396 across 67 countries) allowing us to address limitations related to cross-cultural generalizability and measurement validity in prior research. Our findings demonstrate that low subjective socioeconomic status at the individual level, and income inequality at the national level, are associated with higher levels of moral identity, higher morality-as-cooperation, a larger moral circle, and increased prosocial intentions. These results appear robust to several advanced control analyses. Finally, exploratory analyses indicate that observed income inequality at the national level is not a statistically significant moderator of the associations between subjective socioeconomic status and the included measures of morality. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for understanding human morality under experiences of resource scarcity.
The development of artificial intelligence has led researchers to study the ethical principles that should guide machine behavior. The challenge in building machine morality based on people's moral ...decisions, however, is accounting for the biases in human moral decision-making. In seven studies, this paper investigates how people's personal perspectives and decision-making modes affect their decisions in the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. Moreover, it determines the variations in people's moral decisions that can be attributed to the situational factors of the dilemmas. The reported studies demonstrate that people's moral decisions, regardless of the presented dilemma, are biased by their decision-making mode and personal perspective. Under intuitive moral decisions, participants shift more towards a deontological doctrine by sacrificing the passenger instead of the pedestrian. In addition, once the personal perspective is made salient participants preserve the lives of that perspective, i.e. the passenger shifts towards sacrificing the pedestrian, and vice versa. These biases in people's moral decisions underline the social challenge in the design of a universal moral code for autonomous vehicles. We discuss the implications of our findings and provide directions for future research.
Full text
Available for:
IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
Abstract The physiological processes underlying trust are subject of intense interest in the behavioral sciences. However, very little is known about how trust modulates the affective link between ...individuals. We show here that trust has an effect on heart rate arousal and synchrony, a result consistent with research on joint action and experimental economics. We engaged participants in a series of joint action tasks which, for one group of participants, was interleaved with a PGG, and measured their heart synchrony and arousal. We found that the introduction of the economic game shifted participants' attention to the dynamics of the interaction. This was followed by increased arousal and synchrony of heart rate profiles. Also, the degree of heart rate synchrony was predictive of participants' expectations regarding their partners in the economic game. We conclude that the above changes in physiology and behavior are shaped by the valuation of other people's social behavior, and ultimately indicate trust building process.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
How do people feel during extreme collective rituals? Despite longstanding speculation, few studies have attempted to quantify ritual experiences. Using a novel pre/post design, we quantified ...physiological fluctuations (heart rates) and self-reported affective states from a collective fire-walking ritual in a Mauritian Hindu community. Specifically, we compared changes in levels of happiness, fatigue, and heart rate reactivity among high-ordeal participants (fire-walkers), low-ordeal participants (non-fire-walking participants with familial bonds to fire-walkers) and spectators (unrelated/unknown to the fire-walkers). We observed that fire-walkers experienced the highest increase in heart rate and reported greater happiness post-ritual compared to low-ordeal participants and spectators. Low-ordeal participants reported increased fatigue after the ritual compared to both fire-walkers and spectators, suggesting empathetic identification effects. Thus, witnessing the ritualistic suffering of loved ones may be more exhausting than experiencing suffering oneself. The findings demonstrate that the level of ritual involvement is important for shaping affective responses to collective rituals. Enduring a ritual ordeal is associated with greater happiness, whereas observing a loved-one endure a ritual ordeal is associated with greater fatigue post-ritual.
Full text
Available for:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
PDF
