Figure 8 - available via license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
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Correlations between all personality measures used and the cheatcount. C = Creativity; I = Impulsivity; Ma = Manipulativeness; Mo = morality; GPS= Gough's Personality Scale; HCB = Hovecar's Creative Behavior; DGS = Dispositional Greed Scale; BAS = Behavioral Approach System; BIS = Behavioral Inhibition System; BSSS= Brief Sensation Seeking Scale; SUPPS = Short Urgency, Premediation (lack of),Perseverance (lack of), Sensation Seeking, Positive Urgency Impulsive Behavior Scale; MACH = MACH-IV test of Machiavellianism; MFQ = Moral Foundations Questionnaire; MFV = Moral Foundations Vignettes.* = indicates significant correlations (p<0.05 uncorrected).
Source publication
Many of the economically most costly forms of unethical behavior such as tax evasion, stock manipulations or movie and music piracy relate to the moral domain of (dis)honesty, in which unethical behavior is not targeted at a clearly identifiable victim. While large individual differences in (dis)honesty are evident, the neurocognitive determinants...
Citations
... Their (dis) honesty, as measured in our task, may thus not reflect a stable moral trait. A recent study using resting state fMRI, however, seems to support the notion that the observed individual differences in honesty may generalize (56). That study shows that (dis)honesty, as observed in our task, is represented in stable functional connections at rest, within the self-referential thinking network and between the self-referential thinking and the reward and cognitive control network. ...
Significance
Considering the immense economic costs associated with dishonest behavior, such as tax evasion or music piracy, reducing dishonesty is of great relevance to policy-makers. However, targeting dishonesty with interventions requires a thorough understanding of the underlying (neuro)cognitive processes. We combine neuroimaging with a task that pioneers in measuring the neural mechanisms underlying (dis)honesty. While replicating previous findings that greed drives dishonesty, we reveal that self-referential thinking processes promoted honest behavior. Moreover, we found that cognitive control does not serve the same purpose across individuals but facilitates honest decisions for cheaters, whereas it enables cheating for honest participants. We thus observe that different processes prevent dishonesty for different individuals, which can prove instrumental in the development of more effective interventions.
