To determine the role of moral norms in cooperation and punishment, we examined the effects of a moral-framing manipulation in a Prisoner's Dilemma game with a costly punishment option. In each round ...of the game, participants decided whether to cooperate or to defect. The Prisoner's Dilemma game was identical for all participants with the exception that the behavioral options were paired with moral labels ("I cooperate" and "I cheat") in the moral-framing condition and with neutral labels ("A" and "B") in the neutral-framing condition. After each round of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, participants had the opportunity to invest some of their money to punish their partners. In two experiments, moral framing increased moral and hypocritical punishment: participants were more likely to punish partners for defection when moral labels were used than when neutral labels were used. When the participants' cooperation was enforced by their partners' moral punishment, moral framing did not only increase moral and hypocritical punishment but also cooperation. The results suggest that moral framing activates a cooperative norm that specifically increases moral and hypocritical punishment. Furthermore, the experience of moral punishment by the partners may increase the importance of social norms for cooperation, which may explain why moral framing effects on cooperation were found only when participants were subject to moral punishment.
Findings reported in the memory literature suggest that the emotional components of an encoding episode can be dissociated from nonemotional memory. In particular, it has been found that the previous ...association with threatening events can be retrieved in aversive conditioning even in the absence of item identification. In the present study, we test whether emotional source memory can be independent of item recognition. Participants saw pictures of snakes paired with threatening and nonthreatening context information (poisonousness or nonpoisonousness). In the source memory test, participants were required to remember whether a snake was associated with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness. A simple extension of a well-established multinomial source monitoring model was used to measure source memory for unrecognized items. By using this model, it was possible to assess directly whether participants were able to associate a previously seen snake with poisonousness or nonpoisonousness even if the snake itself was not recognized as having been presented during the experiment. In 3 experiments, emotional source memory was only found for recognized items. While source memory for recognized items differed between emotional and nonemotional information, source memory for unrecognized items was equally absent for emotional and nonemotional information. We conclude that emotional context information is bound to item representations and cannot be retrieved in the absence of item recognition.
Do people punish others for defecting or for failing to conform to the majority? In two experiments, we manipulated whether the participants' partners cooperated or defected in the majority of the ...trials of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. The effects of this base-rate manipulation on cooperation and punishment were assessed using a multinomial processing tree model. High compared to low cooperation rates of the partners increased participants' cooperation. When participants' cooperation was not enforced through partner punishment, the participants' cooperation was closely aligned to the cooperation rates of the partners. Moral punishment of defection increased when cooperation rates were high compared to when defection rates were high. However, antisocial punishment of cooperation when defection rates were high was much less likely than moral punishment of defection when cooperation rates were high. In addition, antisocial punishment was increased when cooperation rates were high compared to when defection rates were high. The latter two results contradict the assumption that people punish conformity-violating behavior regardless of whether the behavior supports or disrupts cooperation. Punishment is thus sensitive to the rates of cooperation and defection but, overall, the results are inconsistent with the idea that punishment primarily, let alone exclusively, serves to enforce conformity with the majority.
Abstract
The existence of moral punishment, that is, the fact that cooperative people sacrifice resources to punish defecting partners requires an explanation. Potential explanations are that people ...punish defecting partners to privately express or to communicate their negative emotions in response to the experienced unfairness. If so, then providing participants with alternative ways to privately express or to communicate their emotions should reduce moral punishment. In two experiments, participants interacted with cooperating and defecting partners in a Prisoner’s Dilemma game. After each round, participants communicated their emotions to their partners (Experiments 1 and 2) or only expressed them privately (Experiment 2). Each trial concluded with a costly punishment option. Compared to a no-expression control group, moral punishment was reduced when emotions were communicated to the defecting partner but not when emotions were privately expressed. Moral punishment may thus serve to communicate emotions to defecting partners. However, moral punishment was only reduced but far from being eliminated, suggesting that the communication of emotions does not come close to replacing moral punishment. Furthermore, prompting participants to focus on their emotions had undesirable side-effects: Privately expressing emotions diminished cooperation, enhanced hypocritical punishment (i.e., punishment of defecting partners by defecting participants), and induced an unspecific bias to punish the partners irrespective of their actions.
The present study served to test whether emotion modulates auditory distraction in a serial-order reconstruction task. If auditory distraction results from an attentional trade-off between the ...targets and distractors, auditory distraction should decrease when attention is focused on targets with high negative arousal. Two experiments (with a total N of 284 participants) were conducted to test whether auditory distraction is influenced by target emotion. In Experiment 1 it was examined whether two benchmark effects of auditory distraction-the auditory-deviant effect and the changing-state effect-differ as a function of whether negative high-arousal targets or neutral low-arousal targets are used. Experiment 2 complements Experiment 1 by testing whether target emotion modulates the disruptive effects of reversed sentential speech and steady-state distractor sequences relative to a quiet control condition. Even though the serial order of negative high-arousal targets was better remembered than that of neutral low-arousal targets, demonstrating an emotional facilitation effect on serial-order reconstruction, auditory distraction was not modulated by target emotion. The results provide support of the automatic-capture account according to which auditory distraction, regardless of the specific type of auditory distractor sequence that has to be ignored, is a fundamentally stimulus-driven effect that is rooted in the automatic processing of the to-be-ignored auditory stream and remains unaffected by emotional-motivational factors.
The aim of this study was to examine whether positive and negative mood states affect auditory distraction in a serial-recall task. The duplex-mechanism account differentiates two types of auditory ...distraction. The changing-state effect is postulated to be rooted in interference-by-process and to be automatic. The auditory-deviant effect is attributed to attentional capture by the deviant distractors. Only the auditory-deviant effect, but not the changing-state effect, should be influenced by emotional mood states according to the duplex-mechanism account. Four experiments were conducted to test how auditory distraction is affected by emotional mood states. Mood was induced by autobiographical recall (Experiments 1 and 2) or the presentation of emotional pictures (Experiments 3 and 4). Even though the manipulations were successful in inducing changes in mood, neither positive mood (Experiments 1 and 3) nor negative mood (Experiments 2 and 4) had any effect on distraction despite large samples sizes (N = 851 in total). The results thus are not in line with the hypothesis that auditory distraction is affected by changes in mood state. The results support an automatic-capture account according to which the auditory-deviant effect and the changing-state effect are mainly stimulus-driven effects that are rooted in the automatic processing of the to-be-ignored auditory stream.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, billions of people have to change their behaviours to slow down the spreading of the virus. Protective measures include self-isolation, social (physical) distancing and ...compliance with personal hygiene rules, particularly regular and thorough hand washing. Prevalence estimates for the compliance with the COVID-19 measures are often based on direct self-reports. However, during a health crisis there is strong public pressure to comply with health and safety regulations so that people's responding in direct self-reports may be seriously compromised by social desirability.
In an online survey, an indirect questioning technique was used to test whether the prevalence of hygiene practices may be lower than in conventional surveys when confidentiality of responding is guaranteed. The Extended Crosswise Model is an indirect questioning technique that guarantees the confidentiality of responding. To the degree that direct self-reports are biased by social desirability, prevalence estimates of hygiene practices such as thorough hand washing based on the Extended Crosswise Model should be lower than those based on direct self-reports.
We analysed data of 1434 participants. In the direct questioning group 94.5% of the participants claimed to practice proper hand hygiene; in the indirect questioning group a significantly lower estimate of only 78.1% was observed.
These results indicate that estimates of the degree of commitment to measures designed to counter the spread of the disease may be significantly inflated by social desirability in direct self-reports. Indirect questioning techniques with higher levels of confidentiality seem helpful in obtaining more realistic estimates of the degree to which people follow the recommended personal hygiene measures. More realistic estimates of compliance can help to inform and to adjust public information campaigns on COVID-19 hygiene recommendations.
The present study serves to test whether cooperation and moral punishment are affected by cognitive load. Dual-process theories postulate that moral behavior is intuitive which leads to the ...prediction that cooperation and moral punishment should remain unaffected or may even increase when cognitive load is induced by a secondary task. However, it has also been proposed that cognitive control and deliberation are necessary to choose an economically costly but morally justified option. A third perspective implies that the effects of cognitive load may depend on the specific processes involved in social dilemmas. In the present study, participants played a simultaneous Prisoner's Dilemma game with a punishment option. First, both players decided to cooperate or defect. Then they had the opportunity to punish the partners. In the cognitive-load group, cognitive load was induced by a continuous tone classification task while the no-load group had no distractor task. Under cognitive load, cooperation and moral punishment decreased in comparison to the no-load condition. By contrast, hypocritical and antisocial punishment were not influenced by the dual-task manipulation. Increased cognitive load was associated with a bias to punish the partners irrespective of the outcome of the Prisoner's Dilemma game, suggesting that punishment was applied less purposefully in the cognitive-load condition. The present findings are thus in line with the idea that the availability of cognitive resources does not always have a suppressive effect on moral behaviors, but can have facilitating effects on cooperation and moral punishment.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) enable the generation of realistic facial images that can be used in police lineups. The use of AI image generation offers pragmatic advantages in that ...it allows practitioners to generate filler images directly from the description of the culprit using text-to-image generation, avoids the violation of identity rights of natural persons who are not suspects and eliminates the constraints of being bound to a database with a limited set of photographs. However, the risk exists that using AI-generated filler images provokes more biased selection of the suspect if eyewitnesses are able to distinguish AI-generated filler images from the photograph of the suspect's face. Using a model-based analysis, we compared biased suspect selection directly between lineups with AI-generated filler images and lineups with database-derived filler photographs. The results show that the lineups with AI-generated filler images were perfectly fair and, in fact, led to less biased suspect selection than the lineups with database-derived filler photographs used in previous experiments. These results are encouraging with regard to the potential of AI image generation for constructing fair lineups which should inspire more systematic research on the feasibility of adopting AI technology in forensic settings.
Abstract
Two experiments serve to examine how people make metacognitive judgments about the effects of task-irrelevant sounds on cognitive performance. According to the direct-access account, people ...have direct access to the processes causing auditory distraction. According to the processing-fluency account, people rely on the feeling of processing fluency to make heuristic metacognitive judgments about the distracting effects of sounds. To manipulate the processing fluency of simple piano melodies and segments of Mozart’s sonata K. 448, the audio files of the music were either left in their original forward direction or reversed. The results favor the processing-fluency account over the direct-access account: Even though, objectively, forward and backward music had the same distracting effect on serial recall, stimulus-specific prospective metacognitive judgments showed that participants incorrectly predicted only backward music but not forward music to be distracting. The difference between forward and backward music was reduced but not eliminated in global retrospective metacognitive judgments that participants provided after having experienced the distracting effect of the music first-hand. The results thus provide evidence of a metacognitive illusion in people’s judgments about the effects of music on cognitive performance.
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