Lying is common at age two, becomes the norm by three

They're too young to need to fib about lipstick on their collar or even their unfinished homework but a new study finds the majority of three-year-olds are already practising liars. Deception in very young children has been documented before, but this is the first time it has been systematically tested in a laboratory.

Angela Evans and Kang Lee tested 65 two- and three-year-olds (28 girls) individually in a quiet room, part of which involved them being told not to peek at a toy. Despite this instruction, 80 per cent of the kids sneaked a peek. And when they were asked afterwards if they'd looked, around a quarter of two-year-olds lied about it, rising to 90 per cent of those aged over 43 months.

Although lying was rife among these young children, most of them weren't very adept at it. When asked what the toy was, 76 per cent of the liars blurted out the answer, exposing their dishonesty.

The researchers also put the toddlers through a series of mental tests to see if any particular skills went hand-in-hand with lying. One of these was a kiddies' version of the Stroop test that involved pointing to small pictures of fruits, while ignoring bigger versions. Like the adult Stroop, success at this task is thought to require a mix of inhibitory control and working memory. Evans and Lee found that the children who excelled at the kiddies' Stroop were more likely to lie, which supports the idea that the development of lying depends on a mix of inhibitory ability and remembering the desired answer.

An important implication of this last point, the researchers said, is that the greater honesty of the younger children isn't a mark of their moral purity, but simply a side-effect of their "fragile executive functioning skills."

A weakness of the study is that it doesn't look at different types of lies or tell us anything about the children's motivation for lying.

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Evans, A., and Lee, K. (2013). Emergence of Lying in Very Young Children. Developmental Psychology DOI: 10.1037/a0031409

--Further reading--
Adults are unable to tell when children are lying.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Social disapproval leads to longer lasting behaviour change than cash fines

If you want to influence people's behaviour by hitting them where it hurts, the wallet seems like a great place to aim. Say a local authority began fining litter-bugs on the spot, you can bet the streets would soon be cleaner. But there's a downside. People begin to see the behaviour in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. They stop littering not because it's wrong, but because it makes financial sense. This approach can also encourage would-be litterers to perceive other people's tidy behaviour as a financial rather than a moral choice. None of this matters too much until the litter wardens go home. Absent the financial threat, litterers are quick to start dumping their junk again.

It's not realistic to have a constant method of enforcement in place. So what approach will be more effective than the time-limited influence of fines? A new study by Rob Nelissen and Laetitia Mulder suggests that social disapproval is more effective than financial sanctions because the effects linger on even after the threat of disapproval is lifted.

The researchers invited 84 participants to sit alone at computer cubicles, to play several rounds of a public goods game in groups of four. Players started with 4 Euros each, and every round they chose how much to place into a group kitty. At the end of each round the group stash was multiplied 1.5 times and shared among the four players. The anti-social temptation is to free-load, to enjoy the proceeds from the group payout without contributing a fair share.

One third of the groups played under threat of financial sanction. Each round, these participants saw the contributions of the other players and could choose to fine others one Euro. Players were also told about any fines they'd received. Another third of the groups played under threat of social disapproval. Each round participants could choose to direct their disapproval at other players. They also learned how many players had frowned on their tactics. There was also a control group with no sanction system in place.

For the first seven rounds, both financial threats and social disapproval threats increased fair play (compared with control condition), but the effect of fines was greater. Crucially, at the seventh round, the players in the sanction conditions were told there was a computer malfunction and that the final three rounds would be played without any fining or disapproval system in place. The key test was how they'd behave once the threat of sanction was lifted.

With the sanctions gone, the cooperative play of participants in the financial condition fell away quickly, more so than in the social disapproval condition. Indeed, by the tenth and final round, players in the financial condition played the same selfish style as control condition players. In contrast, the players in the social disapproval condition continued to show signs of increased fair play.

"Clearly this has important implications for public policy," Nelissen and Mulder concluded. "Our results suggest that successful norm induction requires public communication of social (dis)approval, not only because it increases the salience and thus the effectiveness of norms in guiding behaviour, but also because it makes them stick even if people are not consistently punished for their violations."

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Nelissen, R., and Mulder, L. (2013). What makes a sanction “stick”? The effects of financial and social sanctions on norm compliance. Social Influence, 8 (1), 70-80 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2012.729493

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

Disgusted people have enhanced ability to spot dirt

The cool, calm extravert - that's the emotional profile that our culture puts on a pedestal. Prudes, introverts and scaredy-cats just aren't fashionable.

Yet there's mounting psychological research showing that unpopular emotional traits often come with advantages. The anxiously attached are quicker to detect danger, such as smoke in a room; those with trait anxiety have fewer accidents; introverts speak in a way that's perceived as more trustworthy. Now Gary Sherman and his colleagues have published research showing how prudish disgust-sensitivity is associated with a superior ability to detect impurities.

Over one hundred students had to judge repeatedly which of four squares on a computer screen was the odd-one-out in terms of its shading. The squares were either light grey against a white background, with one slightly darker or lighter than the others (akin to spotting dirt against a white background); or they were dark grey against a black background, with one slightly darker or lighter than the others.

Students more prone to disgust (they agreed with statements like "it would bother me to see a rat run across my path") tended to have heightened sensitivity for spotting grey shades against a white background, similar to spotting dirt on a clean surface. They displayed no such heightened sensitivity at the other end of light spectrum - grey on black.

A second study was similar, but this time students more prone to disgust had heightened sensitivity when identifying digits written in light grey against a white background (yet they were no better at spotting grey digits against a mid-grey background).

In a final study, looking at disgusting pictures (e.g. maggots on meat) boosted the ability of disgust-sensitive participants to spot grey digits against a white background. Participants low in disgust sensitivity didn't show this response to the pictures, perhaps because they were unmoved by them.

The effect documented here is a form of perceptual tuning, like the way in infancy we gradually lose our ability to hear sounds that feature in foreign languages. It's not clear if being disgust prone leads to more exposure to clean white surfaces, and so more practice and superior ability at seeing darker shades against a light background. Or if instead, some people have heightened sensitivity at this end of the colour spectrum, which has the effect of making them more prone to disgust. Or both, in a self-perpetuating cycle.

"Disgust not only makes people want to avoid impurities," the researchers said, "but also makes people better able to see them."

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Sherman, G., Haidt, J., and Clore, G. (2012). The Faintest Speck of Dirt: Disgust Enhances the Detection of Impurity. Psychological Science, 23 (12), 1506-1514 DOI: 10.1177/0956797612445318

--Further reading--
More research items on disgust.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

How the threat of violence can make us nice to each other

Under threat of violence, we have a natural instinct to stick together. Researchers say this basic urge explains their seemingly odd observation that feeling threatened, rather than making people bristle, can actually increase their agreeableness.

Andrew White and his colleagues conducted five studies in all. First off, they analysed data from 54 nations around the world showing that the higher a country's spend on their military (a proxy for feeling threatened), the higher their citizens' average score on the personality dimension of agreeableness. The association held even after controlling for a host of potential confounds including a nation's wealth and population density.

Second, White's team surveyed 54 undergrads and found that those who generally felt more threatened in life also tended to report being more agreeable and extravert (scores on conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism were not associated with feeling threatened).

Next, the researchers prompted some of a new group of participants to feel threatened by having them read a story about an intruder entering their house. The remaining participants acted as controls and read a story about losing keys. The threatened participants scored higher in agreeableness (not other traits), but only when they thought about their personality in the context of how they act with people they know well. Moreover, this apparent effect of threat on agreeableness was larger for people who'd grown up in a big family.

Taken together these initial findings support the idea that we have an evolved adaptive response to threat of violence that leads us to affiliate to family and friends, especially if we grow up in a context where this would be useful. This idea complements previous research that suggests we have an evolved instinct to avoid other people when we're under threat of contamination.

A fourth study took things further by testing real-world behaviour. Two kinds of poster were pinned up around campus - one was a threatening reminder about the issue of guns on campus and it featured a pistol pointing out at the reader; the other was about construction on campus. Next to these posters were one of two fund-raising requests, either framed as being for local students or for an out-group of Ethiopian students. The fund-raising notices had pull-off tabs for people to take contact details away. The result here - the gun poster increased students' interest in helping their fellow students, but not outsiders.

Finally, the researchers returned to international data and found that countries that spent more on their military tended to have citizens who score more highly in trusting their family and neighbours, and lower in trusting members of other religions.

"These findings help develop a deeper understanding of one of the ways in which humans respond to threats of violence from others," the researchers said. "Although disagreeableness and mistrust may often seem to arise from violence, it is not always the case. Sometimes nasty breeds nice."

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White, A., Kenrick, D., Li, Y., Mortensen, C., Neuberg, S., and Cohen, A. (2012). When nasty breeds nice: Threats of violence amplify agreeableness at national, individual, and situational levels. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103 (4), 622-634 DOI: 10.1037/a0029140

--Further reading--
Reminder of disease primes the body and mind to repel other people.

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

The unscientific thinking that forever lingers in the minds of physics professors

Young children are inclined to see purpose in the natural world. Ask them why we have rivers, and they'll likely tell you that we have rivers so that boats can travel on them (an example of a "teleological explanation"). Cute, but maybe not that surprising. Well, consider this - a new study with 80 physical scientists finds that they too have a latent tendency to endorse similar teleological explanations for why nature is the way it is. Oh yes, they label those explanations as false most of the time, but put them under time pressure, and their child-like, quasi-religious beliefs shine through.

Deborah Kelemen and her colleagues presented 80 scientists (including physicists, chemists and geographers) with 100 one-sentence statements and their task was to say if each one was true or false. Among the items were teleological statements about nature, such as "Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe". Crucially, half the scientists had to answer under time pressure - just over 3 seconds for each statement - while the others had as long as they liked. There were also control groups of college students and the general public.

Overall, the scientists endorsed fewer of the teleological statements than the control groups (22 per cent vs. 50 per cent approx). No surprise there, given that mainstream science rejects the idea that inanimate objects have purpose, or that there is purposeful design in the natural world. But look at what happened under time pressure. When they were rushed, the scientists endorsed 29 per cent of teleological statements compared with 15 per cent endorsed by the un-rushed scientists. This is consistent with the idea that a tendency to endorse teleological beliefs lingers in the scientists' minds. This unscientific thinking is usually suppressed, but time pressure undermines that conscious suppression.

The scientists' greater inclination to endorse teleological explanation under time pressure wasn't a non-specific effect of being rushed. Time pressure barely affected their judgments about other erroneous statements (i.e. simple false facts). Moreover, scientists who admitted having religious beliefs, or beliefs about Mother Nature being one big organism, were more prone than most to endorsing teleological explanation under time pressure, thus suggesting their latent unscientific thinking fed into their belief systems.

"A broad teleological tendency therefore appears to be a robust, resilient, and developmentally enduring feature of the human mind," the researchers concluded, "that arises early in life and gets masked rather than replaced, even in those whose scientific expertise and explicit metaphysical commitments seem most likely to counteract it."

In a follow-up study, humanities academics showed the same tendency to endorse more teleological statements under time pressure. Intriguingly, their levels of endorsement were lower than college students but no greater than the physical scientists. This suggests that further education of any kind leads to a greater masking of teleological belief, but only up to a point. "The [scientists'] specialised scientific training and substantial knowledge base does no more to ameliorate their unwarranted teleological ideas than an extended humanities education," the researchers said.
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  Kelemen, D., Rottman, J., and Seston, R. (2012). Professional Physical Scientists Display Tenacious Teleological Tendencies: Purpose-Based Reasoning as a Cognitive Default. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/a0030399

Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.

When not to pat someone on the shoulder

Physical touch can be surprisingly persuasive. From diners giving larger tips to waiters who touch them, to people being more helpful to strangers who pat them lightly on the arm, the literature has tended to paint a positive picture of the emotional influence of social touch. But now a study out of Belgium has documented what you might call the dark side of social touching. This isn't about unwanted groping, which is always inappropriate. It's about the fact that context is everything for light social touches, with the new research showing that even a friendly pat on the shoulder can have an adverse effect if it's performed in the wrong situation.

Jeroen Camps and his colleagues had 74 student participants perform a maze challenge in a race against a partner. The outcome was fixed so the participant won by a tiny margin, and then, as the pair left the room, the partner (actually a male or female stooge planted by the researchers) patted the participant on the shoulder lightly three times, smiled gently and wished them good luck for the next task. For participants in the control condition, all this was the same but without the shoulder patting. Next, the participants and their partner went to another room and completed "the dictator game", a simple economic game that involved the participant choosing how many movie-prize credits to share with their partner.

The revealing finding was that participants who'd been patted on the shoulder shared fewer credits with their partner, suggesting that touch can backfire when it's performed in a competitive context, perhaps because it's interpreted as a gesture of dominance. Interestingly, there was no link between participants' awareness of whether they'd been touched and their sharing behaviour; participants who remembered the touch rated it as neutral; and the partner wasn't rated as more unpleasant in the touch condition. All of which suggests the adverse effect of touch on later cooperation was probably non-conscious.

A second study was similar but this time participants and their partner (another stooge, always female) either competed against each other on a puzzle or they cooperated. Again, afterwards, the partner wished them luck, smiled, and either did or didn't pat them on the shoulder at the end, before they both moved to another room to play the dictator game. The results were clear - in a competitive context, touched participants subsequently shared fewer movie-prize credits with their partner, compared with those participants who weren't touched. By contrast, in the cooperative context, touched participants went on to be more generous with their partner, as compared with participants who weren't touched.

"Despite what some people might think, touching someone else may thus not always have desirable social consequences," the researchers said. "A simple tap on the shoulder, even with the best intent, will do nothing but harm when used in the wrong place at the wrong time."

A limitation of the research is the use of a shoulder pat. It could be argued that this is a form of touch with specific connotations, depending on the context. For instance, maybe it is construed as condescending in a competitive situation. By contrast, a lot of the earlier research on the benefits of touch have tended to use a simple, light touch on the arm, which is perhaps a more neutral gesture.

What do you think? Are there any instances when you've been touched lightly (in a non-sexual way) and it's irritated you? Or times that it's endeared you to the toucher? Was it the context that made the difference?

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Camps, J., Tuteleers, C., Stouten, J., and Nelissen, J. (2012). A situational touch: How touch affects people's decision behaviour. Social Influence, 1-14 DOI: 10.1080/15534510.2012.719479

--Further reading--
The power of a light touch on the arm
Why is a touch on the arm so persuasive?

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

People make more moral decisions when they think their heart is racing

Why did the proverbial Good Samaritan cross the road to help the injured stranger? Perhaps he listened to his heart. Not in the poetic sense, but literally. A new study by Jun Gu and his colleagues has highlighted the way cardiac feedback influences people's moral decisions. When students were fed false feedback, leading them to think their heart was racing, they were more likely to volunteer for a good cause and less likely to lie to gain more money.

Eighty-six undergrads arrived at a psychology lab and were asked if they could quickly test out some heart-recording equipment that was needed for a separate study. A wrist monitor was attached to a headset though which false normal (60 beats per minute) or fast (96 beats per minute) heartbeat sounds were played. While the students test-drove the equipment, they were asked to read a recruitment letter, seeking their time for another study into the negative consequences of homophobic discrimination. Forty per cent of students who heard their heart beating fast agreed to volunteer their time, as compared with 17 per cent of students who heard their heart beating at a normal speed.

A second study with 65 more students was similar, but this time as the students tested the heart-monitoring equipment, they played a quick money-sharing game. They simply had to decide whether to instruct their partner, located in another room, to pick option A (which was actually more lucrative for the participant him or herself) or option B (more lucrative for the partner). Participants who heard their heart beating fast were less likely to lie and tell their partner that he or she would be better off choosing option A (31 per cent of them did so, compared with 58 per cent of participants who heard their heart beat at normal speed). A handful of participants were suspicious about the false heart feedback so they were excluded from the analysis, though the general pattern of results was the same with their data included or omitted.

Gu and his colleagues think that a fast heart beat is interpreted by people as a sign they are stressed and that they should adhere to moral conventions as a way to escape that stress. The new finding is consistent with Antonio Damasio's influential Somatic Marker hypothesis, which is based on the idea that bodily feedback guides our decisions, often at a non-conscious level. For example, people playing a card game sweat more when picking from the wrong, costly pile, even before they've realised at a conscious level that it's the wrong choice. The new research also complements recent research showing how bodily perceptions can influence the moral conscience. In one study, participants were less likely to volunteer their time after being given the chance to wash their hands - as if the process of physical cleansing left them feeling less need to compensate for past transgressions.

Cardiac feedback doesn't affect everyone in the same way. In further experiments, Gu and his colleagues demonstrated that the moral decision-making of people who are more mindful (for example, they agreed with statements like: "I perceive my feelings and emotions without having to react to them") was unaffected by the false cardiac feedback. The researchers also found that telling participants that the financial game was a "decision-making" task led to immunity from the false heart feedback, relative to being told the game was an "intuitive task".

This last result is particularly intriguing since we usually assume that thinking more deliberatively helps rein in the wild horses of our emotions, allowing us to behave more morally. The finding of Gu's team suggests that in some circumstances at least, thinking more deliberately can undermine the influence of the heart, actually making it less likely that we'll make a more moral decision.

"The current research reveals that perceived physiological experiences play an important role in influencing moral behaviours," the researchers said. "Listening to your heart may indeed shape ethical behaviours."

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Gu J, Zhong CB, and Page-Gould E (2012). Listen to Your Heart: When False Somatic Feedback Shapes Moral Behavior. Journal of experimental psychology. General PMID: 22889162

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Tipping is more prevalent in countries that are more corrupt

"I don't tip because society says I have to. Alright, I tip when somebody really deserves a tip. If they put forth an effort, I'll give them something extra. But I mean, this tipping automatically, that's for the birds." Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs. 

Mr Pink's approach to tipping is that it should be a reward for past good service. Another way to view tipping is as a payment to ensure superior service in the future. It's this latter, future-oriented motivation for tipping that Magnus Torfason and his colleagues say explains their curious observation.

Using data on tipping behaviour in 32 countries (collected from The International Guide to Tipping) and comparing this against the Corruption Perception Index, the researchers found that rates of corruption are higher in countries that tip more (the correlation was .6 were 1 would be a perfect match). This may strike some as odd - tipping is often seen as altruistic, whereas corruption is immoral. Yet, the researchers propose that tipping to ensure future good service is comparable to a bribe and this could explain the puzzling association.

To test these ideas further, Torfason's team focused on two countries with similar rates of tipping, but different rates of corruption - India (with high tipping and high corruption) and Canada (high tipping, low corruption). A survey of 95 Canadians and 157 Indians revealed that the Indians were more likely than Canadians to say they tipped as a way to ensure good service in the future, and this motivation was correlated with their more positive attitudes towards bribery.

In a final study, the researchers primed 40 US undergrads with either a future-oriented or past-oriented approach to tipping. For this they used two versions of text ostensibly taken from the Emily Post etiquette guide. After reading that tipping should be performed as a way to ensure good service in the future (as opposed to rewarding past good service), the students tended to view two accounts of political and legal bribery more leniently.

"The studies reported here highlight a psychological mechanism that may help explain the surprising association between tipping and bribery both within and across countries," the researchers said. They added that the findings raise some intriguing possibilities - for example, might encouraging people to give tips specifically as a reward for past good service act to reduce the tolerance of bribery in society?
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Magnus Thor Torfason, Francis J. Flynn, and Daniella Kupor (2012). Here Is a Tip: Prosocial Gratuities Are Linked to Corruption. Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550612454888

-Further reading- Why we tip and how to get a bigger tip.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Using yuk! and weird! to teach children new morals

Some morals - such as it being wrong to hurt others - children learn because they see the distress a particular behaviour causes others, or the harm it can bring upon themselves. But other immoral behaviours don't necessarily have obvious victims. These relate to so-called purity-based morals, such as taboo sexual relations, sacrilegious acts or inappropriate eating behaviours. How do kids learn that these things are wrong, especially if they've never actually encountered them?

A new study shows that children are primed to recognise the immorality of certain behaviours by feelings of disgust and beliefs about unnaturalness, especially when these factors are combined. Joshua Rottman and Deborah Kelemen at Boston University manipulated these factors to provoke 7-year-olds into judging novel behaviours by alien characters as immoral.

"This is the first experimental investigation of a clear-cut case of moral acquisition," Rottman and Kelemen said, "one involving morally naive subjects ... and entirely novel and superficially amoral situations."

Sixty-four 7-year-olds were introduced to the faraway planet "Glinhondo" and its alien occupants. The children were then split into four groups and shown pictures of 12 different scenarios, each accompanied by a short spoken description. The scenarios involved several aliens engaging in behaviours directed at their own bodies (e.g. covering their heads with sticks) or at the environment (e.g. sprinkling blue water into a big puddle). After seeing each scenario, the kids had to say whether the depicted behaviour was "wrong" or if it was "OK".

Children in the "disgust" condition viewed the pictures in a room sprayed with the stinky but harmless joke-shop product "Liquid ASS", and the description of the scenarios also highlighted that the alien behaviours were disgusting. Children in the "unnatural" condition viewed the scenarios in a fresh room, but they saw pictures in which only a minority of aliens performed the behaviours and the description highlighted that what they were doing was "unnatural". Kids in a third group experienced a combination of the disgust and unnaturalness - the room stank and it was a minority of aliens performing the behaviour, which was described as unnatural. Finally, some of the kids formed a control group - the room was fresh, all the aliens performed the behaviours and the description merely said that what they were doing was boring.

Children in the combined disgust and unnaturalness condition judged 65 per cent of alien behaviours as "wrong", compared with just 19 per cent of behaviours judged that way by the control group. "This demonstrates that moral acquisition can occur rapidly and in the absence of direct experience with moralised behaviour," the researchers said. "This also speaks against the idea that the primary mechanism guiding moral acquisition is children's active reasoning about harmful or unjust consequences."

The children in the disgust-only or the unnatural-only conditions also judged more alien behaviours as wrong, compared with kids in the control condition, but in both cases they tended to answer "wrong" about half the time, so there's a possibility they were just alternating their answers at random.

The findings show how visceral feelings of disgust combine with intellectual thoughts about what's "natural" to invoke in children a sense of moral wrongness. Another finding was that environmentally directed actions were more often judged as wrong than self-directed actions. "Ultimately, the degree of plasticity inherent within a young child’s moral repertoire is a crucial area of future exploration, and one that is currently under explored," Rottman and Kelemen concluded. "The implications of such research will be substantial, promising to answer fundamental questions about the horizons of our moral nature."
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  Rottman J, and Kelemen D (2012). Aliens behaving badly: Children's acquisition of novel purity-based morals. Cognition, 124 (3), 356-60 PMID: 22743053

Note: image provided courtesy of Josh Rottman.

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

Would you cheat for charity?

Financial dishonesty was one of the contributing factors that caused the recent global economic crisis. Against this backdrop, a new study led by Alan Lewis at the University of Bath has provided an elegant lab demonstration of the way that for most people, right and wrong aren't clear cut. Instead, the research shows people look for ways to justify their financial cheating, probably to maintain their perception of themselves as essentially good. Oh, and the research also suggested that economics students are more dishonest than psychology students - not great news for the future of the financial world!

The first part of the study involved 94 psychology and economics undergrads rolling a die under a cup, and then looking through a hole in the cup so that they alone could see the number. They then reported that number to a researcher on the understanding that it would be translated into a cash donation by the researchers for Cancer Research UK (1 on the die would equal a 10p donation; 6 would equal 60p and so on). Afterward the researcher gave this amount to the participants, who inserted it into a donation box.

The key finding here is that the students tended to report higher numbers than you'd expect from a fair die. So, for example, 24.5 per cent of participants said they'd rolled a six whereas a fair die should have produced a figure of 17 per cent. The researchers estimated that this means 9 per cent of participants lied about rolling a six. This is substantially higher than the figure obtained in a previous study when participants were playing for their own cash reward and it therefore shows how people indulge in moral relativism. More people seem to think it's okay to cheat if it's for charity, than if it's for their own gain.

The second part of the study involved a thought experiment. The same students were asked to imagine rolling a die three times (each time for their eyes only), over and over. They were given twenty hypothetical sequences of the numbers they produced (e.g. 1, 1, 1). In each case, the first number represented the cash reward they would get, where a 1 would equal £1 and so on. The second two numbers represented two further rolls, to establish that the die was fair and to make the sure the die was left in a re-set position. The hypothetical question for each sequence - what first number would the participant tell the researcher they'd obtained? Would they tell the truth, or lie to claim a higher cash reward?

The main finding for this part of the study is that the proportion of lies varied according to the numbers produced in the second and third rolls. For example, if a person (hypothetically) produced a six in either the second or third rolls, they were far more likely to lie and say the first roll produced a six when it didn't.  It's as if getting a six in one of the later, irrelevant rolls somehow made it easier to justify lying about getting that number in the first roll. Overall, 73 per cent of the participants' hypothetical responses were honest, 16 per cent were "justified" lies of this kind, and 9 per cent were out-and-out lies (it's intriguing that so many participants were willing to be honest about the fact that they would have lied, but that's a whole other story).

Lewis and his colleagues also used the data from the second part of the study to compare rates of (self-confessed) hypothetical lying between psychology graduates and economics grads. Economists were much more likely to lie (for example, their rate of outright lying was 13 per cent vs. 6 per cent for psychologists). This was only partly explained by there being more male economists than male psychologists, with men being the more dishonest sex across both disciplines. Of course, another way to look at these data is that the economists were more honest about the fact that they would lie, but again that's another story and an issue not addressed here by the researchers.

"At the level of individual differences it has been demonstrated that economists are more willing to cheat," the researchers said. "This is of some concern given that people with economics degrees hold prominent positions in financial institutions."

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Lewis, A., Bardis, A., Flint, C., Mason, C., Smith, N., Tickle, C., and Zinser, J. (2012). Drawing the line somewhere: An experimental study of moral compromise. Journal of Economic Psychology, 33 (4), 718-725 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2012.01.005

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.

How killing begets more killing (of bugs)

"At first killing was obligatory; afterward we got used to it. We became naturally cruel. We no longer needed encouragement or fines to kill, or even orders or advice." Jean-Baptise Murangira, a killer from Rwanda.

There's plenty of anecdotal evidence that killing escalates - that the more a person kills, the easier they find it to kill again. Andy Martens and Spee Kosloff have investigated this idea experimentally using a bug killing paradigm. Undergrad participants took part in what they thought was a study looking at the ways that exterminators deal with bugs. In fact no bugs were hurt during this research and participants were debriefed "sensitively" at the end. Three participants dropped out after reading the consent form and a further three were omitted from analysis because they suspected they weren't really killing the bugs.

The fifty remaining participants (29 women) were each left in a room alone and given 12 seconds to feed as many of the 21 available woodlice as they wanted, one at a time, into an extermination machine - an adapted coffee grinder with a funnel for inserting the bugs. The woodlice had been warmed briefly with a hair dryer so that they were moving about, thereby ensuring that participants knew they were alive. After the first 12-second phase, the researcher returned to the room briefly to tell the participants that they had a further 12 seconds to repeat the exercise anew. The key test was whether the participants would kill more bugs on the second round.

Crucially, half of the participants had been told that the whole thing was merely a simulation - no bugs would die in either round because the funnel was blocked. These participants inserted the same number of bugs on the second round as they did on the first round (approximately 5.5 bugs on average). By contrast, the other participants who'd been told that the killing was real tended to insert more bugs into the exterminator during the second round (5.4 bugs on average vs. 4.6 on average during the first round).

Martens and Kosloff said this provides evidence that killing escalates. The fact that the escalation was only observed for the participants who thought they were killing shows that the effect wasn't merely due to practice. Earlier research similarly showed that participants instructed to kill more bugs in an initial phase (vs. those told to kill fewer) tended to kill more bugs voluntarily in a second phase - but only if they believed the killing was real.

Why should killing escalate in this way? Martens and Kosloff's theory is that it probably has to do with the justification of earlier actions and with desensitisation. Killing may particularly provoke these reactions in killers because unlike other unethical acts, it isn't possible to undo an earlier killing and amends can't be made to the killed. Other possible factors that lead to escalation could include increased arousal and feelings of power and excitement.

"The impetus of this work was not to develop an understanding of bug-killing per se, but to aid an understanding of situations in which people kill other people," the researchers said. "Perhaps [results like these] can inform the generation of questions necessary for developing a well-rounded understanding of real-world consequences of killing and violence."

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Martens, A., and Kosloff, S. (2012). Evidence that Killing Escalates Within-Subjects in a Bug-Killing Paradigm. Aggressive Behavior DOI: 10.1002/ab.21412

Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.