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Good Lamps Are the Best Police
Abstract
Darkness can conceal identity and encourage moral transgressions; it may also induce a psychological feeling of illusory anonymity that disinhibits dishonest and self-interested behavior regardless of actual anonymity. Three experiments provided empirical evidence supporting this prediction. In Experiment 1, participants in a room with slightly dimmed lighting cheated more and thus earned more undeserved money than those in a well-lit room. In Experiment 2, participants wearing sunglasses behaved more selfishly than those wearing clear glasses. Finally, in Experiment 3, an illusory sense of anonymity mediated the relationship between darkness and self-interested behaviors. Across all three experiments, darkness had no bearing on actual anonymity, yet it still increased morally questionable behaviors. We suggest that the experience of darkness, even when subtle, may induce a sense of anonymity that is not proportionate to actual anonymity in a given situation.
... For example, Zimbardo (30) found that participants dressed in identity-concealing hoods delivered longer electric shocks to strangers than did participants with no hoods. Another experiment found that participants in a room with dimmed lighting cheated for money more than those in a well-lit room (31). A simulation driving experiment (32) found that participants drove in a more deviant manner when they were anonymous (e.g., in convertible vehicles with the tops closed) than when they were visible (e.g., in convertible vehicles with the tops open). ...
... Deviant Behavior. After the imagination task, participants proceeded with an ostensibly unrelated number-search matrix task (48), which is widely used to measure deviant behavior (31,(49)(50)(51)(52)(53)(54)(55)(56)(57). Participants saw eight 4 × 3 matrices of three-digit numbers (Fig. 5). ...
... Sense of Anonymity (Alternative Mediator). We also measured participants' sense of anonymity in their imagined situation using four items adapted from Zhong et al. (31): "I was anonymous in the situation I imagined", "My behavior went unnoticed in the situation I imagined", "My identity was not known to others in the situation I imagined", and "No one was paying attention to my behavior in the situation I imagined" (1 = strongly disagree, 7 = strongly agree; α = 0.83). The display order of the four items was randomized across participants. ...
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, mask wearing has become a global phenomenon. How do masks influence wearers’ behavior in everyday life? We examine the effect of masks on wearers’ deviant behavior in China, where mask wearing is mostly a public health issue rather than a political issue. Drawing on behavioral ethics research, we test two competing hypotheses: (a) masks disinhibit wearers’ deviant behavior by increasing their sense of anonymity; (b) masks are a moral symbol that reduces wearers’ deviant behavior by heightening their moral awareness. The latter hypothesis was consistently supported by 10 studies (including direct replications) using mixed methods (e.g., traffic camera recording analysis, observational field studies, online experiments, natural field experiment) and different measures of deviant behavior (e.g., running a red light, bike parking in no-parking zones, cheating for money, deviant behavior in the library). Our research (N = 68,243) is among the first to uncover the psychological and behavioral consequences of mask wearing beyond its health benefits.
... For instance, individuals made 84% lower donations when their behavior was not observed and their names hidden, compared to when they were identifiable 39 , and the subjective belief that their behavior could be clearly identified increased individuals' contribution behavior 40,41 . Similarly, Zhong et al. 8,9 found that participants wearing sunglasses had an illusory sense of anonymity and behaved more selfishly than those wearing clear glasses. ...
... These findings are inconsistent with previous research that found that reduced perceived identifiability results in reduced prosocial behavior. Although our study differs in many ways from previous recent studies such as Vesely and Klöckner 39 and Zhong et al. 9 , it is noteworthy that these studies were considerably underpowered to detect typical social psychological effects. Recent meta-scientific work 57 indicates that the median effect size in the field of social psychology overall is d = 0.36. ...
... The N = 136 by Vesely and Klöckner 39 would have provided 67.13% power to detect an effect of d = 0.36. And the N = 50 and N = 83 for the study 2 and study 3 respectively by Zhong et al. 9 would have provided only 23.87% and 36.73% power to detect such an effect. ...
Covering the face with masks in public settings has been recommended since the start of the pandemic. Because faces provide information about identity, and that face masks hide a portion of the face, it is plausible to expect individuals who wear a mask to consider themselves less identifiable. Prior research suggests that perceived identifiability is positively related to prosocial behavior, and with two pre-registered field studies (total N = 5706) we provide a currently relevant and practical test of this relation. Our findings indicate that mask wearers and non-wearers display equivalent levels of helping behavior (Studies 1 and 2), although mask wearers have a lower level of perceived identifiability than those without a mask (Study 2). Overall, our findings suggest that claims that face masks are related to selfish behavior are not warranted, and that there is no practical link between perceived identifiability and prosocial behavior.
... Brightness is also commonly associated with morality. People's perception of light and shade has become one way for researchers to learn about moral concepts (Steidle & Werth, 2014;Zhong et al., 2010). The perception of light affects moral judgment; using the response-time matching paradigm, the researchers found that when white was matched with a moral word, the participants' response time was shorter and faster. ...
... These findings have implications for exploring whether the brightness metaphor affects the memory process. Specifically, researchers in the past have tended to assume that brightness does not change in memory (Cooper et al., 2019), and explore only the effect of metaphor on brightness perception, requiring participants to respond immediately (Banerjee et al., 2012;Steidle & Werth, 2014;Zhong et al., 2010). However, the study of Cooper et al. broke this view and observed a new phenomenon from the perspective of brightness memory research. ...
... On this basis, different cultures have developed similar brightness cultures, and brightness metaphors are valid across cultures (Han, 2001). In recent years, studies of brightness metaphors in different countries have also supported the cross-cultural nature of brightness metaphors (Dong et al., 2015;Grillon et al., 1997;Huang et al., 2018;Meier et al., 2004Meier et al., , 2007Zhong et al., 2010). ...
Brightness-based metaphor effects on perception have been widely documented. For example, moral content makes perception brighter. But does moral content make a bright memory brighter? We tested the effect of the moral brightness metaphor on different cognitive processes (perception, working memory, and long-term memory), and extended evidence of the relationship between brightness and moral concepts to the relationship between brightness and positive concepts. Different samples of college students participated in five experiments. In all experiments, moral (immoral) and positive (negative) pictures of varying levels of brightness were presented, and then participants reconstructed the brightness of each picture using a keyboard to adjust the brightness of an picture. Together, the results of ANOVAs across experiments showed that the metaphorical effect of brightness played no role in perception or working memory, but there was a significant increase in brightness in long-term memory. These results support the non-unidirectionality of metaphor, and extend the conceptual metaphor theory and simulating sensorimotor metaphors theory by enhancing the effect of metaphor through the cognitive mechanism of long-term memory.
... Popular theorizing suggests that monitored employees tend to be more sensitive to productivity demands and experience increased accountability (Eisenhardt, 1989;Ravid et al., 2020). In line with these arguments, several studies suggest electronically monitored employees perform assigned tasks with greater efficiency (Aiello & Kolb, 1995;Aiello & Svec, 1993;Bartels & Nordstrom, 2012;Bhave, 2014) and are less likely to violate company standards (Pierce et al., 2015;Zhong et al., 2010). Yet, accumulating evidence questions the overall efficacy of electronic monitoring. ...
... In this way, electronic monitoring ostensibly helps managers deter poor employee task performance by motivating expected behavior (e.g., task behavior) and reducing inefficient or deviant behavior (e.g., loafing). Indeed, when employees know their performance is monitored, they often seek to act in accordance with expected demands (Aiello & Kolb, 1995;Zhong et al., 2010). ...
Changing workplace dynamics have led employers to increasingly adopt electronic monitoring technologies so supervisors can observe and ensure employee compliance and productivity—outcomes the monitoring literature has long supported. Yet, employee productivity depends on strong leader–member social exchange, and the relational consequences of electronic monitoring for supervisor and employee are not well understood. To help resolve this tension within the monitoring literature and add understanding in regard to the effects of electronic monitoring on employee productivity, we use social exchange theory to examine the implications of electronic monitoring for the supervisor–employee exchange relationship. We theorize that electronic monitoring facilitates (rather than inhibits) production deviance and inhibits (rather than facilitates) task performance by undermining the exchange of social benefits and, consequently, eroding leader–member social exchange. Yet, we also hypothesize that supervisors who give performance monitoring data back to employees in a developmental way (i.e., developmental feedback) compensate for the loss of certain social benefits, and, thereby, buffer the negative relational consequences of electronic monitoring. Across an experimental online study and a field study, we find converging support for our predictions and rule out alternative explanations. This research provides timely insights into how to effectively use electronic monitoring without promoting unintended consequences.
... Consistent with this intuition, traditional theorizing argues that monitoring increases accountability (Bhave, 2014;Eisenhardt, 1989). Moreover, there is some evidence that monitoring effectively deters targeted deviant workplace behavior (i.e., monitoring specific forms of theft reduces that theft; Pierce et al., 2015;Zhong et al., 2010). Most monitoring tools readily advertise these benefits (Cutter et al., 2020). ...
... Given that people are highly sensitive to increases in the visibility of their actions (Zhong et al., 2010), monitoring provides employers with a tool to increase desired behaviors and decrease undesired behaviors through external oversight (Pierce et al., 2015). Although the monitoring literature has predominantly focused on the role of external regulation, monitoring may also have unintended and unfavorable consequences on employees' internal regulatory systems. ...
Organizations have long sought to mitigate risks associated with unsupervised employee conduct (e.g., employee deviance) through employee monitoring, an approach consistent with traditional theorizing. Yet the effectiveness of employee monitoring as a deviance deterrent has been called into question by emerging evidence suggesting that monitored employees may actually engage in higher levels of deviance. To address this critical tension and shed light on why and when monitoring leads to deviance, we draw upon social cognitive theory to examine the self-regulatory consequences of employee monitoring. We theorize that monitoring paradoxically creates conditions for more (not less) deviance by diminishing employees’ sense of agency, thereby facilitating moral disengagement via displacement of responsibility. Integrating fairness heuristic theory, we further argue that overall justice provides a powerful heuristic that mitigates the potential loss of sense of agency associated with monitoring. Accordingly, we suggest that employee perceptions of high justice will attenuate displacement of responsibility and, in turn, deviance. Across a field study and an experimental study, we find converging support for our predictions and rule out alternative explanations. This research provides important theoretical and practical insights into how monitoring can be used effectively without also promoting unintended consequences.
... These behaviors are encouraged in darker environments, where a sense of anonymity occurs due to the difficulty of facial recognition [30]. A study reinforced this, showing evidence of these behaviors, such as dishonesty actions associated with dark environments [31]. In contrast, a bright environment may induce self-regulation and self-awareness when performing impulsive actions [32]. ...
... Lighting promotes surveillance of people, which studies have suggested can prevent crimes [16]. In addition, a welllit area decreases the feeling of anonymity in people, mitigating stimulus for deviant behavior [31]. However, a study indicates that the role of lighting in crime prevention more likely works via community pride and informal social control than through surveillance and deterrence [100]. ...
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) aim at providing a healthier planet for present and future generations. At the most recent SDG summit held in 2019, Member States recognized that the achievements accomplished to date have been insufficient to achieve this mission. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review of 227 documents contextualizing outdoor lighting with SDGs, showing its potential to resolve some existing issues related to the SDG targets. From a list of 17 goals, six SDGs were identified to have relevant synergies with outdoor lighting in smart cities, including SDG 3 (Good health and well-being), SDG 11 (Sustainable cities and communities), SDG 14 (Life below water) and SDG 15 (Life on land). This review also links efficient lighting roles partially with SDG 7 (Affordable and clean energy) and SDG 13 (Climate action) through Target 7.3 and Target 13.2, respectively. This paper identifies outdoor lighting as a vector directly impacting 16 of the 50 targets in the six SDGs involved. Each section in this review discusses the main aspects of outdoor lighting by a human-centric, energy efficiency and environmental impacts. Each aspect addresses the most recent studies contributing to lighting solutions in the literature, helping us to understand the positive and negative impacts of artificial lighting on living beings. In addition, the work summarizes the proposed solutions and results tackling specific topics impacting SDG demands.
... Darkness induces a sense of anonymity [23] and concern about being caught may no longer be sufficiently salient to activate the behavioral inhibition system which would otherwise inhibit dishonest activity [24]. Robbery is an interpersonal crime, in which a criminal takes (or attempts to take) property directly from another person, where force may be used or threatened [25]. ...
... A statistically significant effect of ambient light level was found for one type of crime, robbery, with the OR (1.58) suggesting an increase in robbery after dark compared with daylight, confirming previous work concluding that robbery is influenced by ambient light level [11,22]. As noted above, the assumed anonymity from darkness promotes moral transgressions [23]; darkness also impairs vision and hence reduces the ability to detect an approaching robber and subsequently identify them. Xu et al. [10] also note previous work concluding that that higher visibility was significantly correlated (p < 0.01) with fewer robberies of retail stores in the US, giving the proposition that robbers choose their targets based on the likelihood of the robbery being witnessed from outside the store. ...
The influence of lighting on crime was investigated by considering the effect of ambient light level on crimes recorded in three US cities for the ten-year period 2010 to 2019. Crime counts were compared for similar times of day, before and after the biannual clock change, therefore employing an abrupt change of light level but without an obvious intervention such as improving road lighting in an area. The results suggest a significant increase in robbery during darkness, confirming previous studies. The results also suggest darkness leads to an increase in arson and curfew loitering offenses, and to a decrease in disorderly conduct, family offences (non-violent) and prostitution. Future research investigating the effectiveness of improved street lighting should consider that this may not be beneficial for all types of crime.
... Previous research found that a bright environment, one with many plants, and with a clean smell, influences participants to increase positive behaviors [5][6][7][8]. Similarly, prior research has also found that the environment may have a negative effect: disorganization, fewer plants, low brightness, and extreme environmental temperatures may cause violent crimes [2], rule-breaking [9], cheating [10]. In general, the environment plays an important role in daily life. ...
... In general, these findings are consistent with the idea that the environment is related to behavior [1,2,10,23]. Previous research found that emotion influences moral and immoral behaviors; positive emotions lead to an increase in moral behavior, and negative emotions lead to an increase in immoral behavior [13,19,39]. ...
The environment affects moral behavior. Previous research found that a beautiful environment leads to pro-social behavior, which is related to behavioral intention. However, the effect of environmental aesthetic value on immoral and moral behavior remains unclear. Therefore, in the present study, we explored the effect of environmental aesthetic value on behavioral intention and its possible mechanisms. We conducted four experiments. Experiment 1 adopted the priming paradigm and IAT paradigm to explore the relationship between environmental aesthetic value and behavioral intention. It used photographs of the environment as priming stimuli and scene drawings of behavior as target stimuli. The results showed that participants had a higher intention to engage in moral behavior in an environment with a high aesthetic value, and a lower intention to engage in immoral behavior, compared to in an environment with a low aesthetic value. Similarly, an environment with a low aesthetic value was related to immoral behavior. Experiment 2 further explored the possible mechanism for the above results: changes in moral judgment. The results showed that moral judgment in different environments may lead to different behavioral intentions. The current study extends prior research by demonstrating the effect of environmental aesthetic value on behavioral intention and moral judgment, and good knowledge about the relationship between environmental aesthetic value and moral behavior. In addition, it provides a new hypothesis for the relationship between environment and behavior according to the results of the environment–behavior matching hypothesis, which can provide a new perspective on moral education.
... Turning back to the benefits of observability, certain environmental properties, which are found to reduce perceived anonymity, could be more effective in promoting prosocial behavior when they are implemented under the proposed conditions. For instance, as compared to darkness, illumination (i.e., bright light) is shown to make people feel more identifiable and accountable for their acts (Zhong et al., 2010); this, in turn, leads to increased ethical and prosocial behavior (Chiou & Cheng, 2013;Steidle & Werth, 2014;Yap, 2016). Considering that illumination is shown to facilitate suppression of socially undesirable impulses (Steidle & Werth, 2014), bright light may be particularly effective for enhancing low-cost prosocial acts (e.g., respecting rules, paying for one's drinks, cleaning-up one's own litter, etc.). ...
The watching eyes effect has gained significant attention in recent years both from scientists and from policy makers and professionals in the field. The phenomenon posits that the mere presence of eye cues can promote prosocial behavior. However, there is a growing debate about the generality of the effect across various measures and contexts. This review seeks to combine various distinct -and formerly isolated- perspectives by identifying four key components for effective interventions based on the watching eyes effect: Anonymity, crowdedness, costs, and exposure. Eye cues need to reduce perceived anonymity, be placed in non-crowded places, target low-cost prosocial acts and appear for a short amount of time. Next to these conditions, we discuss implications for other cues to reputation and recommend directions that will stimulate further research and applications in society.
... In a field experiment, participants pay 2.76 times more money to the honesty box for coffee and tea when they see "a pair of eyes" watching them than when they see beautiful "flowers" (Bateson et al., 2006). A sense of anonymity (dimming lights/wearing sunglasses) causes individuals to cheat (Zhong et al., 2010). In ten city-country comparisons, city songbirds sing their urban songs shorter, faster, and at a higher minimum frequency due to the urban noise than their country counterparts (Slabbekoorn & den Boer-Visser, 2006). ...
Corruption involves greed, money, and risky decision-making. We explore the love of money, pay satisfaction, probability of risk, and dishonesty across cultures. Avaricious monetary aspiration breeds unethicality. Prospect theory frames decisions in the gains-losses domain and high-low probability. Pay dissatisfaction (in the losses domain) incites dishonesty in the name of justice at the individual level. The Corruption Perceptions Index, CPI, signals a high-low probability of getting caught for dishonesty at the country level. We theorize that decision-makers adopt avaricious love-of-money aspiration as a lens and frame dishonesty in the gains-losses domain (pay satisfaction-dissatisfaction, Level 1) and high-low probability (CPI, Level 2) to maximize expected utility and ultimate serenity. We challenge the myth: Pay satisfaction mitigates dishonesty across nations consistently. Based on 6500 managers in 32 countries, our cross-level three-dimensional visualization offers the following discoveries. Underhigh aspiration conditions, pay dissatisfaction excites the highest- (third-highest) avaricious justice-seeking dishonesty in high (medium) CPI nations, supporting the certainty effect. However, pay satisfaction provokes the second-highest avaricious opportunity-seizing dishonesty in low CPI entities, sustaining the possibility effect—maximizing expected utility. Under low aspiration conditions, high pay satisfaction consistently leads to low dishonesty,
demonstrating risk aversion—achieving ultimate serenity. We expand prospect theory from a micro and individual-level theory to a cross-level theory of monetary wisdom across 32 nations. We enhance the S-shaped Curve to three 3-D corruption surfaces across three levels of the global economic pyramid, providing novel insights into behavioral economics, business ethics, the environment, and responsibility
... Ayal et al. (2015) outlined three principles for reducing cheating behaviors, including visibility. Indeed, lab work has established that when anonymity is reduced, good behavior increases (Kirchler et al., 2008;Zhong et al., 2010). The all-seeing gods and strict cultural norms that religion and tightness, respectively, offer represent two additional mechanisms by which visibility is introduced to a culture, thereby reducing cheating behavior. ...
Wordle is a daily, online brainteaser. The widespread popularity of the game in the early months of 2022 has also led to widespread cheating. Here, we use data from Google Trends and Twitter to explore correlates of cheating on Wordle. We find that cheating behavior is negatively related to religiosity and cultural tightness. Although this is a benign example of cheating behavior, we discuss how popular trends can be used as case studies of group-level behavior.
... Because humans have evolved a circadian rhythm that is heavily influenced by light conditions, both natural and artificial (Cajochen et al., 2000;Smolders & de Kort, 2014), it comes as no surprise that lighting has great impacts on human behavior, cognition, and emotion (de Kort & Veitch, 2014). More specifically, ambient lighting has been shown to influence consumer behavior (Areni & Kim, 1994;Summers & Hebert, 2001;Wansink & van Ittersum, 2012), dishonesty and self-interested behavior (Bo-Zhong et al., 2010), communication behavior (Gifford, 1988), physiological arousal and alertness (Badia et al., 1991;Rüger et al., 2006), cognitive task performance (Baron et al., 1992;Boyce et al., 1997;Huiberts et al., 2015), and emotional responses (Grillon et al., 1997(Grillon et al., , 1999Mühlberger et al., 2008;Veenstra & Koole, 2018). These findings suggest ambient lighting is particularly relevant to the human motivational systems and their evolved, automatic influences on cognition, emotion, and behavior. ...
This study examined the role of motivation in processing sequentially coactive content (i.e., positive leading to negative or the reverse). A motivational inhibition hypothesis was proposed to predict the processing of sequentially coactive content as a function of changes in arousing content. Results provided evidence in support of the mutual inhibitory effects between the appetitive and aversive systems during sequential coactivation and further revealed the role of change in arousing content in resource allocation during different patterns of motivational inhibition. Theoretically, this study extended previous work in offering a clarification on the boundary conditions governing the effect of proposed motivational inhibition when processing sequentially coactive content.
... www.nature.com/scientificreports/ It has been shown across a range of experimental paradigms that people are less likely to act selfishly (and less likely to lie about acting selfishly) if others are watching [27][28][29][30] . ...
Cooperative behaviour can evolve through conditional strategies that direct cooperation towards interaction partners who have themselves been cooperative in the past. Such strategies are common in human cooperation, but they can be vulnerable to manipulation: individuals may try to exaggerate their past cooperation to elicit reciprocal contributions or improve their reputation for future gains. Little is known about the prevalence and the ramifications of misrepresentation in human cooperation, neither in general nor about its cultural facets (self-sacrifice for the group is valued differently across cultures). Here, we present a large-scale interactive decision making experiment (N = 870), performed in China and the USA, in which individuals had repeated cooperative interactions in groups. Our results show that (1) most individuals from both cultures overstate their contributions to the group if given the opportunity, (2) misrepresentation of cooperation is detrimental to cooperation in future interactions, and (3) the possibility to build up a personal reputation amplifies the effects of misrepresentation on cooperation in China, but not in the USA. Our results suggest that misrepresentation of cooperation is likely to be an important factor in (the evolution of) human social behaviour, with, depending on culture, diverging impacts on cooperation outcomes.
... Among these five senses, sight was the dominant sense, being most memorable and recognizable (Agapito, 2020;Krishna, 2012) and the most important factor for future research (Sun & Lv, 2021). Individuals' visual experience of darkness/lightness were found to be associated with their behavior (e.g., moral consideration, dishonesty; Jacobs et al., 2015;Chiou & Cheng, 2013;Zhong et al., 2010). ...
Dark-light spectrum was used to express the depth of dark experience in dark tourism. Based on embodied cognition theory, this paper examined the visual expression of tourists' dark tourism experience. Five consecutive studies were conducted including analysis of tourists' photos in online reviews of 53 dark tourism destinations worldwide, charcoal pencil painting tasks of selected dark tourism sites in lab experiments, and field experiment. Results showed that tourists with darker experience tend to use deeper visual darkness to express their feelings, in the forms of painting and photographs, even when the cognitive process (i.e., expression in the form of words) is omitted. This psychological mechanism explains the scientific principle behind dark tourism spectrum. Our research suggests a new way of interpretation of tourist image data (e.g., photos) and sheds light for effective management of tourist experience.
... Recent studies have found that such metaphorical mental links may not only be triggered by physical cleanliness but also potentially by environmental factors such as brightness, temperature, and smell. People exposed to contrasting environmental conditions (e.g., darkness vs. brightness; cold vs. warmth; clean scents vs. disgusting scents) will display different moral judgments and behaviors (Liljenquist, Zhong, & Galinsky, 2010;IJzerman & Semin, 2009;Meier, Robinson, & Clore, 2004;Meier, Robinson, Crawford, & Ahlvers, 2007;Schnall, Haidt, Clore, & Jordan, 2008;Williams & Bargh, 2008;Zhong, Bohns, & Gino, 2010;Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008), but there is some controversy over the conclusions of these studies (Corke, Lynott, Wortman, Connell, Donnellan, Lucas, et al., 2014;Lynott, Corker, Wortman, Connell, Donnellan, Lucas, et al., 2014;Williams, 2014). ...
Cleanliness connotes cleanness, hygiene, and beauty. Physical cleanliness is also a metaphor for moral purity, as proposed in recent literature. However, cleanliness means not only physical cleanliness but also environmental cleanliness. The article proposes that environmental cleanliness and physical self-cleanliness may metaphorically influence immoral behaviors in the workplace, and their effects may be different. The current study conducted a 2 (environmental cleanliness: clean vs. dirty) × 3 (self-cleanliness: hands-cleansing vs. face-cleansing vs. non-cleansing) between-subjects field experiment with employees as participants in a Chinese enterprise. One-hundred-seventy-seven employees volunteered to participate in the experiment. It was found that a clean workplace, rather than physical self-cleansing, renders harsh moral judgment regarding immoral workplace behaviors. The participants were less willing to accept immoral workplace behaviors in a clean environment than in a dirty environment, while self-cleanliness (hands-cleansing or face-cleansing vs. non-cleansing) had no significant influence on employees’ moral judgments of immoral workplace behaviors. In addition, the significant effects of environmental cleanliness were found in all the ten dimensions of immoral workplace behaviors. The findings reveal the metaphorical association between environmental cleanliness and the concept of higher social moral norms, and confirm that environmental cleanliness is a key factor leading to moral metaphorical effects. This result provides unique insight to the social significance of environmental cleanliness, and has important implications to prevent immoral workplace behaviors. A theoretical framework is proposed to explain why environmental cleanliness is more likely to affect moral judgment involving organizational interests than self-cleanliness. Considering most previous research has been done with samples of college students, this study is especially valuable through a field experiment on actual employees.
... Because humans have evolved a circadian rhythm that is heavily influenced by light conditions, both natural and artificial (Cajochen et al., 2000;Smolders & de Kort, 2014), it comes as no surprise that lighting has great impacts on human behavior, cognition, and emotion (de Kort & Veitch, 2014). More specifically, ambient lighting has been shown to influence consumer behavior (Areni & Kim, 1994;Summers & Hebert, 2001;Wansink & van Ittersum, 2012), dishonesty and self-interested behavior (Bo-Zhong et al., 2010), communication behavior (Gifford, 1988), physiological arousal and alertness (Badia et al., 1991;Rüger et al., 2006), cognitive task performance (Baron et al., 1992;Boyce et al., 1997;Huiberts et al., 2015), and emotional responses (Grillon et al., 1997(Grillon et al., , 1999Mühlberger et al., 2008;Veenstra & Koole, 2018). These findings suggest ambient lighting is particularly relevant to the human motivational systems and their evolved, automatic influences on cognition, emotion, and behavior. ...
Ambient lighting has been identified as a motivationally relevant context that affects cognition, emotion, and behavior, including food consumption and choice. This study adds to this body of work utilizing optimal foraging theory, which predicts individuals will prefer foods that deliver the most energy while costing the least energy to obtain. The environmental contexts in which one will have to forage alter perceived energy expenditure. An experiment was performed in which young adults viewed food advertisements that varied in energy density level in either dim or bright contexts. Metrics assessing motivational activation and attitudes were obtained across and post exposure. Individuals exhibited greater motivational intensity and preference when exposed to more energy dense foods in light contexts, but preference dissipated in dark contexts. Less energy dense foods elicited more motivational preference in dark contexts compared to light. Self-reported attitudes and intentions were only affected by context. Thus, variations in lighting may have larger implications for food choice and overall health.
... Given the prevalence and high societal costs of dishonesty, a large number of experimental studies have attempted to identify the factors associated with fraudulent and dishonest behavior, such as self-serving justifications (Gino & Ariely, 2012); self-control (Mead et al., 2009;Shalvi, Eldar & Bereby-Meyer, 2012); collaboration with a dishonest partner (Ścigała et al., 2019); feelings of entitlement (Poon et al., 2013) or anonymity (Zhong et al., 2010). Typically, these studies randomly assign participants into experimental and control groups and measure the causal effect of the manipulated factor. ...
In many situations people behave ethically, while elsewhere dishonesty reigns. Studies of the determinants of unethical behavior often use random assignment of participants in various conditions to identify contextual or psychological factors influencing dishonesty. However, in many real-world contexts, people deliberately choose or avoid specific environments. In three experiments (total N = 2,124) enabling self-selection of participants in two similar tasks, one of which allowed for cheating, we found that participants who chose the task where they could lie for financial gain reported a higher number of correct predictions than those who were assigned it at random. Introduction of financial costs for entering the cheating-allowing task led to a decrease in interest in the task; however, it also led to more intense cheating. An intervention aimed to discourage participants from choosing the cheating-enabling environment based on social norm information did not have the expected effect; on the contrary, it backfired. In summary, the results suggest that people low in moral character are likely to eventually dominate cheating-enabling environments, where they then cheat extensively. Interventions trying to limit the preference of this environment may not have the expected effect as they could lead to the selection of the worst fraudsters.
... Die keuze kan bijvoorbeeld worden bepaald door: een ongeval 's nachts, de aanwezigheid van getuigen en de kans dat die getuigen iets hebben gezien ondanks slecht weer of slechte verlichting. Dit is een algemeen principe in de criminologie: wanneer men zich anoniem waant, zal men zich eerder strafbaar gedragen dan wanneer men zich niet anoniem waant(Zhong et al., 2010). Voorts speelt ook het imago van de veroorzaker een rol. ...
Het begrip “vluchtmisdrijf” krijgt in België twee invullingen: het vluchten na een aanrijding en het vluchten voor een politiecontrole. In de volksmond spreken we vooral over vluchtmisdrijf wanneer de bestuurder vlucht na een aanrijding. Dit vluchtgedrag staat centraal in deze bijdrage en is strafbaar, ongeacht of de bestuurder in fout is of niet (Lodewyckx, 2019). Dit geldt ook voor ongevallen met enkel materiele schade, wanneer je bijvoorbeeld een andere wagen raakt op een parking en zomaar vertrekt. De boodschap is: wanneer je schade veroorzaakt en de tegenpartij niet aanwezig is, verwittig je de politie. De vluchter riskeert een gevangenisstraf van vijftien dagen tot zes maanden en met een geldboete van 200 tot 2.000 euro. Er gelden nog zwaardere straffen wanneer een slachtoffer ernstig gewond raakt of overlijdt. Ook wanneer de bestuurder meerdere keren wordt veroordeeld voor vluchtmisdrijf, geldt een zwaardere straf. Die kan oplopen tot een gevangenisstraf van acht jaar en een boete tot 10.000 euro.
... Danger approaches. In Kelly's day photoproduced in lighting conditions often associated with a greater tendency toward morality (Steidle & Werth, 2014;Zhong et al., 2010)-the danger, a car that seemingly came from nowhere, has arrived and departed, leaving mayhem in its wake. ...
This article critically analyzes a pair of photographs from the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017: Samuel Corum’s nighttime image of torch-bearing protesters on the University of Virginia campus and Ryan Kelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning daytime image of counterprotesters falling through the air as James A. Fields Jr. rammed his car into them, killing Heather Heyer. Using a close reading of the images as texts—considering their production, contrasts, and resonances—we argue that the photographs form a temporal, technical, and theoretical diptych of anger, hate, fear, confusion, and sorrow.
... Experiences of lightness and darkness leading to different bodily results (e.g., Jacobs, Gallo, Cooper, Pulli, & Levoy, 2015) and behaviors have been demonstrated, such as experiencing brightness increases the salience of moral considerations (Chiou & Cheng, 2013). Conversely, experiencing darkness increases dishonesty (Zhong, Bohns, & Gino, 2010). Dark tourism experiences are related both to visual and moral darkness; thus, whether the "darkness" in dark tourism experiences causes visitors' physical responses requires empirical study. ...
Embodiment is a key under-researched component of dark tourism experiences. Qualitative and experimental methods were applied in four studies to reveal the bidirectional body–mind synchronization in dark tourism experiences. Taking the Chernobyl zone as a case, we first prove the mind-to-body pathway in which the dark experience exerts a measurable effect on the participants' sensory expression in photographs and sketches. We then discover the body-to-mind pathway in which the expressions of darkness can be decoded by others. Furthermore, this study illustrates how the different dark levels of the product photos on a website affect the potential tourists' feelings. This study expands the understanding of embodiment theory in dark tourism with implications for product design and marketing.
... Studies on dishonest behavior do not usually apply a debriefing, since it can be very harmful for the participant well-being (e.g. [6,21,33]), especially for people who had in fact cheated to get the reward. ...
Future human-robot interactions will have to consider different human traits. One human feature that may be affected by the presence of virtual agents or robots is human honesty. Will people try to take advantage in the presence of a robot/virtual agent? Some previous studies have shown that the physical presence of a robot can decrease cheating in humans. In this paper, we investigated if merely a simple video of a robot looking at the user was enough to affect human's cheating behavior. Further, we also investigated if the Honesty-Humility personality trait predicted cheating. We conducted a study with 160 participants that were randomly allocated to one of two conditions: (1) performing the task with a video of a robot looking at them, or (2) doing the task alone. Results showed that being alone or with a video of a robot produced equal levels of cheating and the Honesty-Humility dimension predicted cheating, particularly the fairness sub-domain was responsible for predicting cheating behavior. This study has implications for future scenarios where dishonesty might be tempting, and physical presence of an observer might not be possible.
... However, studies on dishonest behavior do not usually apply a debriefing, since it can be very harmful for the participant well-being (e.g. [28], [2], [29], especially for people who had in fact cheated to get the reward. ...
People are not perfect, and if given the chance, some will be dishonest with no regrets. Some people will cheat just a little to gain some advantage, and others will not do it at all. With the prospect of more human-robot interactions in the future, it will become very important to understand which kind of roles a robot can have in the regulation of cheating behavior. We investigated whether people will cheat while in the presence of a robot and to what extent this depends on the role the robot plays. We ran a study to test cheating behavior with a die task, and allocated people to one of the following conditions: 1) participants were alone in the room while doing the task; 2) with a robot with a vigilant role or 3) with a robot that had a supporting role in the task, accompanying and giving instructions. Our results showed that participants cheated significantly more than chance when they were alone or with the robot giving instructions. In contrast, cheating could not be proven when the robot presented a vigilant role. This study has implications for human-robot interaction and for the deployment of autonomous robots in sensitive roles in which people may be prone to dishonest behavior.
... That is, people in large crowds are less identifiable and less likely to hold themselves personally accountable for their actions (Darley & Latané, 1968). Similarly, individuals cloaked in darkness are less easily identified, and as a result, experience lower levels of behavioral inhibition (Gergen, Gergen, & Barton, 1973;Zhong, Bohns, & Gino, 2010). Finally, Mann hypothesized that suicide baiting would occur more frequently under conditions where the victim and crowd were separated by relatively larger distances because each would be less identifiable to the other, thereby increasing the likelihood that crowd members would dehumanize the suicidal individual (Milgram, 1965). ...
Using the lens of Deindividuation Theory, Leon Mann explored the formation of baiting crowds in a small sample of public suicides/suicide attempts. Instead of attempting to prevent the suicide, baiting crowds encourage the victim to jump. Our aim was to replicate Mann's study with a larger more diverse sample of suicide attempts and a broadened theoretical lens (Frustration-Aggression). Using ProQuest, we identified 152 public suicide attempts reported in English language newspapers and failed to replicate Mann’s findings. Rather, baiting crowd formation was associated with variables that increase crowd frustration (e.g., duration of the event, blocked traffic, cordoned off pedestrian walkways). Finally, we failed to find an association between the presence of a baiting crowd and the suicidal individual ultimately jumping.
... Feelings of illusory anonymity foster cheating (Zhong, Bohns, & Gino, 2010). Thus, it is not surprising that cheating has been shown to be greater when the same study is performed online compared to when it is performed in a laboratory (Bereby-Meyer et al, 2018). ...
Previous studies show that decision makers (DMs) lie more to avoid a loss than achieve a gain. Two compelling mechanisms might explain this observation. One assumes that lying is a risky activity and relates to the shape of the monetary value function described by prospect theory, which assumes (a) increased risk taking for loss frames and (b) an asymmetry between the perceived values of losses and gains. The other relates to the importance of self‐esteem functions as expressed in self‐concept maintenance models, self‐esteem issues being weighed against monetary issues. This alternative explanation assumes that a loss frame serves as a factor lowering moral considerations. We report an experimental study presenting sets of lotteries to DMs, once in a moral context and once in a traditional probabilistic context. The results show that DMs take less risk when lotteries are presented in a moral context. It is also shown that DMs take more risk for losses than gains, this holding for both the moral and probabilistic contexts. This latter result suggests that loss/gain asymmetry can be completely explained by prospect theory factors, and framing makes no difference to the valuing of moral considerations.
https://doi.org/10.1002/bdm.2151
It is a popular belief that colours impact one's psychological and affective functioning. However, clear-cut scientific evidence is still lacking, largely due to methodological challenges. Virtual reality (VR) enabled us to control and modify the environment. We exposed 60 participants to red or blue environments varying in lightness and saturation. We assessed participants' physiological responses (i.e. arousal) with heart rate and skin conductance measures, and their self-reported levels of valence and arousal in response to the coloured environments. The results revealed physiological effects of lightness and hue. When compared with the baseline measures, heart rate increased, and heart rate variability decreased more in the dark than the medium lightness rooms. Both measures signalled higher arousal in the darker room, irrespective of hue. Also, when compared with the baseline measures, skin conductance increased more in the red than the blue rooms, again signalling higher arousal in the red condition. The difference between the red and the blue conditions was detectable only on some saturation and lightness combinations. We conclude that being immersed in environments of different colours can change physiological arousal. However, not all changes are driven by hue and not all the effects are measurable on all physiological parameters.
Human musicality exhibits the necessary hallmarks for biological adaptations. Evolutionary explanations focus on recurrent adaptive problems that human musicality possibly solved in ancestral environments, such as mate selection and competition, social bonding/cohesion and social grooming, perceptual and motor skill development, conflict reduction, safe time-passing, transgenerational communication, mood regulation and synchronization, and credible signaling of coalition and territorial/predator defense. Although not mutually exclusive, these different hypotheses are still not conceptually integrated nor clearly derived from independent principles. I propose The Nocturnal Evolution of Human Musicality and Performativity Theory in which the night-time is the missing piece of the adaptationist puzzle of human musicality and performing arts. The expansion of nocturnal activities throughout human evolution, which is tied to tree-to-ground sleep transition and habitual use of fire, might help (i) explain the evolution of musicality from independent principles, (ii) explain various seemingly unrelated music features and functions, and (iii) integrate many ancestral adaptive values proposed. The expansion into the nocturnal niche posed recurrent ancestral adaptive challenges/opportunities: lack of luminosity, regrouping to cook before sleep, imminent dangerousness, low temperatures, peak tiredness, and concealment of identity. These crucial night-time features might have selected evening-oriented individuals who were prone to acoustic communication, more alert and imaginative, gregarious, risk-taking and novelty-seeking, prone to anxiety modulation, hedonistic, promiscuous, and disinhibited. Those night-time selected dispositions may have converged and enhanced protomusicality into human musicality by facilitating it to assume many survival- and reproduction-enhancing roles (social cohesion and coordination, signaling of coalitions, territorial defense, antipredatorial defense, knowledge transference, safe passage of time, children lullabies, and sexual selection) that are correspondent to the co-occurring night-time adaptive challenges/opportunities. The nocturnal dynamic may help explain musical features (sound, loudness, repetitiveness, call and response, song, elaboration/virtuosity, and duetting/chorusing). Across vertebrates, acoustic communication mostly occurs in nocturnal species. The eveningness chronotype is common among musicians and composers. Adolescents, who are the most evening-oriented humans, enjoy more music. Contemporary tribal nocturnal activities around the campfire involve eating, singing/dancing, storytelling, and rituals. I discuss the nocturnal integration of musicality’s many roles and conclude that musicality is probably a multifunctional mental adaptation that evolved along with the night-time adaptive landscape.
Enclothed cognition refers to the systematic influence that clothes can have on the wearer's feelings, thoughts, and behaviors through their symbolic meaning. It has attracted considerable academic and nonacademic interest, with the 2012 article that coined the phrase cited more than 600 times and covered in more than 160 news outlets. However, a recent high-powered replication failed to replicate one of the original effects. To determine whether the larger body of research on enclothed cognition possesses evidential value and replicable effects, we performed z-curve and meta-analyses using 105 effects from 40 studies across 24 articles (N = 3,789). Underscoring the marked improvement of psychological research practices in the mid-2010s, our results raise concerns about the replicability of early enclothed cognition studies but affirm the evidential value for effects published after 2015. These later studies support the core principle of enclothed cognition-what we wear influences how we think, feel, and act.
Objective
: This research examined the effects of color lightness on evaluating advertisements featuring nonheteronormativity‐themed images.
Methods
: An increasing number of brands feature nonheteronormative couples in advertisement campaigns to target nonheteronormative consumers and position brands as socially progressive. Four studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that nonheteronormativity‐themed advertising that uses lighter images would receive more favorable evaluations than darker images.
Results
: The color lightness effect influenced attitudes toward the ad, product evaluations, and purchase intentions. Individuals with political conservatism exhibited a preference for lighter colored ads than darker colored ads. Furthermore, the effects of color lightness type on attitude toward ads were moderated by political conservatism, and this effect was mediated by disgust.
Conclusion
: The current study suggests that a carefully designed advertising campaign featuring nonheteronormativity(gay) couples, which considers design elements can be used to target consumers and signal progressive values supported by sponsoring brands.
There is growing concern about the extent to which economic games played in the laboratory generalize to social behaviors outside the lab. Here, we show that it is possible to make a game much more predictive of field behavior by bringing contextual elements from the field to the lab. We report three experiments where we present the same participants with different versions of the dictator game and with two different field situations. The games are designed to include elements that make them progressively more similar to the field. We find a dramatic increase in lab–field correlations as contextual elements are incorporated, which has wide-ranging implications for experiments on economic decision making.
Three behaviour types – suicide, trespass and risky behaviours, which can result in entry to railway tracks – present an ongoing challenge to the rail industry for fatality prevention. Many preventative interventions exist, operating at different stages in the timeline of a person’s decision to access the tracks to the point that they have entered and remain in the track area. However, there is little understanding of the impacts of interventions on the behaviours in question. This paper outlines the generation of the functional requirements for the use of lighting as safety interventions, which can contribute towards the development and evaluation of such interventions. The study includes the analysis of literature on how lighting has been used to date in the prevention of suicide, trespass and other risky behaviour on railway property. Interviews were carried out with 13 key stakeholders who have expertise in the behaviours in question and awareness of the range of safety interventions used in practice in railway settings. The analysis explores how lighting can be used to influence these different behaviour types. Functionalities that are both theoretically and empirically promising are identified. These functionalities include the need for reactive environmental changes, novelty, ability to influence decision-making and ability to support a human response, for example, through highlighting to staff when someone has entered the tracks. These functionalities offer developers a framework for developing (and subsequently evaluating) a range of novel intervention technologies, which could highlight specific lighting properties that could influence behaviour.
For some time interest has been growing in a dialogue between modern scientific research into human cognition and research in the humanities. This ground-breaking volume focuses this dialogue on the religious experience of men and women in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Each chapter examines a particular historical problem arising from an ancient religious activity and the contributions range across a wide variety of both ancient contexts and sources, exploring and integrating literary, epigraphic, visual and archaeological evidence. In order to avoid a simple polarity between physical aspects (ritual) and mental aspects (belief) of religion, the contributors draw on theories of cognition as embodied, emergent, enactive and extended, accepting the complexity, multimodality and multicausality of human life. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters open up new questions around and develop new insights into the physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects of ancient religions.
Current evidence suggests that preventive measures, such as social distancing and wearing face masks, are critical to contain the spread of COVID-19. The recent burgeoning literature has empirically examined how a wide range of facet-level personality and individual-differences variables are associated with people's adherence to COVID-19 regulations. However, there lacks direct evidence regarding the role of chronotype in compliance with pandemic safety measures. According to the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis, people of later chronotype are more likely to breach COVID-19 restrictions. Despite this hypothesis shedding considerable light on the potential role of chronotype in the abidance of the virus-mitigating measures, it has not been rigorously tested using empirical data. To fill this gap, the present research investigated the link between morningness-eveningness and compliance with COVID-19 containment policies in Chinese samples. Two studies using multiple populations (students and community adults) and diverse measures of adherence to public health guidelines (self-report and actual behavior) consistently show that individuals who orient towards morningness display a higher level of compliance with COVID-19 prevention than people who orient towards eveningness. Overall, these findings present the first empirical confirmation of the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis, highlighting the role of chronotype in adherence to COVID-19 prevention guidelines.
For some time interest has been growing in a dialogue between modern scientific research into human cognition and research in the humanities. This ground-breaking volume focuses this dialogue on the religious experience of men and women in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Each chapter examines a particular historical problem arising from an ancient religious activity and the contributions range across a wide variety of both ancient contexts and sources, exploring and integrating literary, epigraphic, visual and archaeological evidence. In order to avoid a simple polarity between physical aspects (ritual) and mental aspects (belief) of religion, the contributors draw on theories of cognition as embodied, emergent, enactive and extended, accepting the complexity, multimodality and multicausality of human life. Through this interdisciplinary approach, the chapters open up new questions around and develop new insights into the physical, emotional, and cognitive aspects of ancient religions.
Previous studies have suggested mixed results about the effect of road lighting on crime. One potential explanation is that the effect of lighting, if any, varies with the type of crime. This was tested through analysis of the effect of change in ambient light level on crimes recorded in 11 cities in the USA for the 10-year period 2010–2019. The results suggest that ambient light level had a consistent effect on robbery, with darkness leading to an increase in robbery, but did not suggest a significant effect for other types of crime.
We introduce a three-phase model of decision-making as examined through a Machiavellian lens. Distinct from previous research, we broaden our research premise from Machiavellianism exhibited by an individual to Machiavellianism at the organizational level. We examine this type of organization beginning with an emphasis on organizational values and practices, which we define as climate emergence. After establishing the process of climate emergence, we examine employee sensemaking within a Machiavellian climate by drawing on Rest's decision-making model. Our research culminates with an exploration of resultant employee behaviors while emphasizing the moderating role of dispositional Machiavellianism. We conclude with a discussion centered on how this perspective fits within recent research and its impact on organizational practices.
Many jurisdictions prohibit or severely restrict the use of evidence about a defendant's character to prove legal culpability. Situationists, who argue that conduct is largely determined by situational features rather than by character, can easily defend this prohibition. According to situationism, character evidence is misleading or paltry. Proscriptions on character evidence seem harder to justify, however, on virtue ethical accounts. It appears that excluding character evidence either denies the centrality of character for explaining conduct—the situationist position—or omits probative evidence. Situationism is, after all, presented as antithetical to virtue ethics. This essay provides a virtue ethical defense of character evidence exclusion rules. We show that existing virtue ethical rebuttals to situationism themselves support prohibitions on character evidence; even if behavior arises from stable character traits, character evidence should be prohibited. In building our case, we provide a taxonomy of kinds of character judgment and reconcile the ubiquity and reasonableness of character judgments in ordinary life with the epistemic legitimacy of character evidence prohibitions in law.
The physical environment plays an important role in moral cognition. Previous research has demonstrated that the physical environment affects individual moral judgment. Investigators have argued that the environment influences moral judgment through emotion and cognition, such as during metaphor processing. Following the intensification of urbanization and increases in population size, the phenomenon of a narrow environment has become more common. However, the relation between environmental spaciousness and moral judgment has not been thoroughly examined. We examined the effect of environmental spaciousness (spaciousness vs. narrowness) on moral judgments in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2. Results showed that participants report a higher rating score of moral judgment in more spacious environments compared with narrow environments. We further explored the roles of emotion and metaphor in the relation between environmental spaciousness and moral judgments. We found support for a partial mediation effect of emotion in the relationship between environmental spaciousness and moral judgment. The results also supported an association between the concept of spaciousness and tolerant cognition. Spacious environments may elicit positive emotions and more tolerant cognition, which in turn influences moral judgment. These results provide new evidence for the influence of the environment on moral judgments, and more attention may be warranted to incorporate this relationship in environmental design.
Across many languages and cultures, people tend to explicitly and implicitly associate brightness with God and darkness with the Devil. In the current research, we used an explicit Brightness-Godassociation test(Study 1) and an implicit reaction-time task (Study 2) to investigate religious cognitions in Bai people, an ethnic minority group in southwest China. While Bai people were faster to categorize Devil-related words appearing in a black font versuswhite font, they showed no significant differences in categorizing God-related words when the words presented in a white font versus black font, consistent with their explicit conventions that link“God”with both“brightness”and “darkness”. This pattern of God representations seems to contrast sharply with many other metaphorical associations documented to date. These findings are consistent with the worship of Mahakala (known as “Black Sky god”) in Benzhuism, a local religion in Bai people. Such results cannot be accounted for by valence correspondence such as both concepts of darkness and God having positive meanings. This is because Bai people demonstrate a strong preference for the color white versus black in their culture. We provide the first empirical evidence that light-dark metaphors in religious representations can show variations across cultures.
Around the world, almost every aspect of people’s lives has been affected by the novel coronavirus (COVID-19). We focused on one context that has received relatively little attention to date: the courtroom. Guided by established psychological findings and theories, we explored how the emergence of COVID-19 and proposed protective measures against the virus (i.e. face masks, physical distancing) could affect legal decision-making at trial. For the majority of the phenomena that we considered, the extant literature predicted negative or mixed effects. Because it appears likely that extralegal factors related to the pandemic will affect outcomes, the fairness of proceedings must be called into question. Overall, this work suggests that the reopening of the courts might be premature. It also highlights the importance of leveraging established psychological findings to address questions arising from unpredictable events when direct research is not yet available.
Despite the considerable amount of research devoted to understanding fraud, few studies have examined how the physical environment can influence the likelihood of committing fraud. One recent study found a link between room brightness and occurrence of human fraud behaviors. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate how temperature may affect fraud. Based on a power analysis using the effect size observed in a pilot study, we recruited 105 participants and randomly divided them into three temperature groups (warm, medium, and cool). We then counted fraud behaviors in each group and tested for potential significant differences with a Kruskal–Wallis test. Additionally, we used a correlation analysis to determine whether the perceived temperature affected fraud. As a result, regardless of participants’ subjective sensory experience or their physical environment, we did not find that temperature-related factors influence the incidence of fraud. We discussed the potential reason for the results and suggested directions for future research.
Meta‐analytic findings suggest that strongly enforcing ethical codes of conduct reduces unethical behaviour. However, this conclusion is based on a limited number of studies, leading ethics scholars to suggest that we need to know more about the effects of codes. Furthermore, the importance of understanding how individual differences may interact with situational characteristics to influence unethical behaviour has long been recognized, but few studies have examined both personal and situational variables. Using norm focus theory as an organizing framework, the authors argue that enforcement of an ethical code of conduct and individual‐level conscientiousness interacts to influence unethical behaviour. In Study 1, participants attended a laboratory session in which a code of conduct was presented and the participants had the opportunity to earn additional compensation if they acted unethically. Participants engaged in less unethical behaviour after they observed strict enforcement, but this was qualified by an enforcement x conscientiousness interaction: Strict enforcement led to lower unethical behaviour only among those who were more conscientious. In Study 2, a survey of working adults showed that the relation between code enforcement and unethical behaviour was mediated by a focus on injunctive norms, but only among those who were more conscientious. The findings therefore indicate that there are important boundary conditions on the effects of codes of conduct.
Practitioner points
• When people are aware of a code of conduct, but have no information about how strongly the code of conduct is enforced, they view enforcement as similar to a situation wherein they witness weak enforcement.
• Strongly enforced codes of conduct serve to (1) increase the importance of avoiding unethical behaviour, and (2) reduce the magnitude of unethical behaviour, but only among those who are more conscientiousness.
• To ensure reduction of unethical behaviour, organizations must strongly enforce codes and select employees who are highly conscientious.
• Alternatively, organizations may test different methods of enforcement to identify those that are effective in reducing unethical behaviour regardless of how conscientious employees are.
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.
Despite revival, virtue ethics is subject to criticisms, most notably from situationism. Based on empirical findings, the situationists argue that only very few people possess virtues. Hence, virtue ethics that tells us to cultivate virtues is impractical. By referring to Zhu Xi, this chapter argues that although only few of us have robust virtues at the moment, virtue cultivation is still possible, practical, and necessary as we have a good human nature and numerous ways for cultivation.
Cambridge Core - Computing and Society - Blockchain Democracy - by William Magnuson
What influences how people render their moral judgment? Focusing specifically on the conceptual metaphors “ moral is upright ” and “ immoral is tilted ”, we sought to investigate whether physical slant can influence people’s harsh moral judgment. Experiment 1 induced physical slant by having participants complete the questionnaire at a tilt table. We observed a significant effect with participants who experienced physical slant rendering a less severe moral judgment than did those who wrote their responses at a level table. Using a new manipulation of physical slant and a larger, more diverse sample, Experiment 2 asked participants to complete the questionnaires with rotated text or normal text. We observed a difference between the two groups: compared to participants who read the normal text, those with a visual experience of slant lessened the severity of their moral judgments. Taken together, the results showed that the consequence of tilted experience exerts downstream effects on moral reasoning, which suggests that incidental bodily experience affects how people render their decisions.
We examine the persuasiveness of advertising messages based on individuals’ tendency towards metaphoric thinking measured by metaphor usage measure (MUM) and construal level. Two on-line studies show that individuals’ metaphoric thinking tendency moderates the perceived persuasiveness of advertising messages (metaphor vs. non-metaphor) and that construal level mediates this effect. Study 1 shows that MUM moderates the effect of message type demonstrating that individuals with high MUM evaluate a metaphoric message more persuasive. Study 2 demonstrates that this interaction is mediated by construal level. Analysis using PROCESS macro revealed that construal level decreases after being exposed to a metaphoric message which is opposite to what was expected. Additional analysis was performed to probe a possible cause for this unexpected finding. Although it is premature to conclude, it appears that shift-in-emotion in high-level construal may need further investigation. In addition, findings suggest that metaphor may be effective only to those who are in a high tendency towards metaphoric thinking.
Besides endangering human health, air pollution has profound effects on individuals’ cognition, emotions, and behavior. Previous studies have found that air pollution could increase self-oriented lies. We summarized two explanations for this phenomenon: (1) air pollution makes people less likely to regard lies as unethical, and (2) air pollution makes people more likely to approach materials rewards. The present study mainly measured three kinds of lies—self-convenience, other-convenience, and other-material lies—to investigate these two explanations. Participants were asked to imagine living in either a polluted or a clean situation in two online studies and one laboratory study. The results showed that air pollution did not influence self-convenience lies (Studies 1 and 2), and clean air increased both other-convenience and other-material lies (Studies 2 and 3). According to these results, both explanations are supported. The theoretical implications of the present study are discussed.
Demonstrated that a subjective state of deindividuation mediates the effect of deindividuating situational cues on aggression displayed by small groups of coacting aggressors. 72 male university students were instructed to administer shocks to another person in what they thought were studies of biofeedback and behavior modification. The deindividuated state was composed of 2 factors, Self-Awareness and Altered Experiencing, both of which had a causal influence on aggressive behavior. These data are interpreted in terms of deindividuation theories that assume that certain input variables reduce self-awareness and concern about social evaluation and thereby weaken the restraints against expressing antisocial behavior. As predicted, compared with a no-model control condition, a high-aggressive model disinhibited overt displays of aggression, whereas a low-aggressive model inhibited aggression among both individuated and deindividuated group members. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators. (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Dishonesty plays a large role in the economy. Causes for (dis)honest behavior seem to be based partially on external rewards, and partially on internal rewards. Here, we investigate how such external and internal rewards work in concert to produce (dis)honesty. We propose and test a theory of self-concept maintenance that allows people to engage to some level in dishonest behavior, thereby benefiting from external benefits of dishonesty, while maintaining their positive view about themselves in terms of being honest individuals. The results show that (1) given the opportunity to engage in beneficial dishonesty, people will engage in such behaviors; (2) the amount of dishonesty is largely insensitive to either the expected external benefits or the costs associated with the deceptive acts; (3) people know about their actions but do not update their self-concepts; (4) causing people to become more aware of their internal standards for honesty decreases their tendency for deception; and (5) increasing the "degrees of freedom" that people have to interpret their actions increases their tendency for deception. We suggest that dishonesty governed by self-concept maintenance is likely to be prevalent in the economy, and understanding it has important implications for designing effective methods to curb dishonesty.Former working paper titles:“(Dis)Honesty: A Combination of Internal and External Rewards” and "Almost Honest: Internal and External Motives for Honesty")
In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators.
Three sets of studies provide evidence for an illusion of transparency, or a tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which others can discern their internal states. People often mistakenly believe that their internal states "leak out" more than they really do. The authors attribute this bias to a tendency for people to adjust insufficiently from the "anchor" of their own phenomenological experience when attempting to take another's perspective. Evidence for this illusion is provided by showing that liars overestimate the detectability of their lies (Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c) and that people believe their feelings of disgust are more apparent than they actually are (Studies 2a and 2b). A final pair of experiments (Studies 3a and 3b) explores the implications of the illusion of transparency for people's reluctance to intervene in emergencies. All 3 sets of studies also provide evidence consistent with the proposed anchoring and adjustment interpretation.
Mediating variables are prominent in psychological theory and research. A mediating variable transmits the effect of an independent variable on a dependent variable. Differences between mediating variables and confounders, moderators, and covariates are outlined. Statistical methods to assess mediation and modern comprehensive approaches are described. Future directions for mediation analysis are discussed.
Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar. Occasionally, beliefs concerning uncertain events are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. In general, the heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors. The subjective assessment of probability resembles the subjective assessment of physical quantities such as distance or size. These judgments are all based on data of limited validity, which are processed according to heuristic rules. However, the reliance on this rule leads to systematic errors in the estimation of distance. This chapter describes three heuristics that are employed in making judgments under uncertainty. The first is representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event belongs to a class or event. The second is the availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development, and the third is adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available.
Examines the ideas of luxury, control, and utility in order to understand the urge to light streets in the nineteenth century, when adequate lighting technology was invented. The grounds on which lights were justified in three fairly typical nineteenth century cities - Minneapolis, Minnesota; Sheffield, England; and Bochum, Germany - are examined. -Author
While psychologists "were demonstrating in the laboratory the remarkably fine degree of control which man had at his disposal, all hell was breaking loose outside in the real world." Recent evidence regarding self-destruction, the destruction of others, riots, mob violence, the diminution in the value of life, and the loss of control of behavior is presented. Research evidence relating anonymity to aggression, car smashing, vandalism, and other violent acts is also presented. The "releaser cues" required to initiate destructive vandalism in various cities such as New York and Palo Alto are compared. Anonymity, deindividuation, dehumanization, and control (or the lack of it) are the key words. "In the eternal struggle between order and chaos, we openly hope for individuation to triumph, but secretly plot mutiny with the forces within, drawn by the irresistible lure of deindividuation." (26 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
2 very complex and detailed experiments explored the subjective state wherein self-consciousness is lessened to the extent that restraints against undesirable behavior are effectively removed. Results were mixed and generally indicate both support and non-support for the hypotheses. Modifications of both the deindividuation concept and the conformity concept are suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
"A group phenomenon which we have called de-individuation has been described and defined as a state of affairs in a group where members do not pay attention to other individuals
qua individuals, and, correspondingly, the members do not feel they are being singled out by others." The theory was advanced that this results in a reduction of inner restraints in the members and that, consequently, the members will be more free to indulge in behavior from which they are usually restrained. It was further hypothesized that this is satisfying and its occurrence would tend to increase the attractiveness of the group. The data from the study tend to confirm the theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
It was hypothesized that darkness acts as a disinhibitor, and that subjects would deliver higher intensity shocks to a victim in a dimly lit setting than in a brightly lit setting. It was also predicted that this effect would be greater when subject and victim were in close proximity than when they were isolated from each other. The results supported these predictions. It was suggested that lighting may have important effects on social behaviors, and that further research on the influences of lighting on human behavior is needed.
• This work, a second edition of which has very kindly been requested, was followed by La Construction du réel chez l'enfant and was to have been completed by a study of the genesis of imitation in the child. The latter piece of research, whose publication we have postponed because it is so closely connected with the analysis of play and representational symbolism, appeared in 1945, inserted in a third work, La formation du symbole chez l'enfant. Together these three works form one entity dedicated to the beginnings of intelligence, that is to say, to the various manifestations of sensorimotor intelligence and to the most elementary forms of expression. The theses developed in this volume, which concern in particular the formation of the sensorimotor schemata and the mechanism of mental assimilation, have given rise to much discussion which pleases us and prompts us to thank both our opponents and our sympathizers for their kind interest in our work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Children generally behave more egocentrically than adults when assessing another's perspective. We argue that this difference does not, however, indicate that adults process information less egocentrically than children, but rather that adults are better able to subsequently correct an initial egocentric interpretation. An experiment tracking participants' eye movements during a referential communication task indicated that children and adults were equally quick to interpret a spoken instruction egocentrically but differed in the speed with which they corrected that interpretation and looked at the intended (i.e., non-egocentric) object. The existing differences in egocentrism between children and adults therefore seems less a product of where people start in their perspective taking process than where they stop, with lingering egocentric biases among adults produced by insufficient correction of an automatic moment of egocentrism. We suggest that this pattern of similarity in automatic, but not controlled, processes may explain between-group differences in a variety of dual-process judgments.
This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: (i) representativeness,
which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process
B; (ii) availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a
class or the plausibility of a particular development; and (iii) adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical
prediction when a relevant value is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead
to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could
improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty.
In a world where encounters with dishonesty are frequent, it is important to know if exposure to other people's unethical behavior can increase or decrease an individual's dishonesty. In Experiment 1, our confederate cheated ostentatiously by finishing a task impossibly quickly and leaving the room with the maximum reward. In line with social-norms theory, participants' level of unethical behavior increased when the confederate was an in-group member, but decreased when the confederate was an out-group member. In Experiment 2, our confederate instead asked a question about cheating, which merely strengthened the saliency of this possibility. This manipulation decreased the level of unethical behavior among the other group members. These results suggest that individuals' unethicality does not depend on the simple calculations of cost-benefit analysis, but rather depends on the social norms implied by the dishonesty of others and also on the saliency of dishonesty.
This experiment demonstrated that a subjective state of deindividuation mediates the effect of deindividuating situational cues on aggression displayed by small groups (n = 4) of coacting aggressors. The deindividuated state was composed of two factors, Self-Awareness and Altered Experiencing, both of which had a causal influence on aggressive behavior. These data are interpreted in terms of deindividuation theories which assume that certain input variables reduce self-awareness and concern about social evaluation and thereby weaken the restraints against expressing antisocial behavior. Also as predicted, compared with a no-model control condition, a high-aggressive model disinhibited overt displays of aggression, whereas a low-aggressive model inhibited aggression among both individuated and deindividuated group members.
Well planned lighting is city progress
- E B Karnes
Karnes, E.B. (1960, April). Well planned lighting is city progress.
American City Magazine, 75, 104-105.
Lighting reinforces crime fight
- J E Hartley
Hartley, J.E. (1974). Lighting reinforces crime fight. Pittsfield, MA:
Buttenheim.
The conduct of life (pp. 191–230). Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press. (Original work published 1860) Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential cor-rection
- R W Emerson
Emerson, R.W. (1888). Worship. In E.W. Emerson (Ed.), The conduct of life (pp. 191–230). Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press. (Original work published 1860) Epley, N., Morewedge, C.K., & Keysar, B. (2004). Perspective taking in children and adults: Equivalent egocentrism but differential cor-rection. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 760–768.
The conduct of life (pp. 191-230)
- R W Emerson
Emerson, R.W. (1888). Worship. In E.W. Emerson (Ed.), The conduct
of life (pp. 191-230). Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press. (Original
work published 1860)