The Difference Spotting Task: A new nonverbal measure of cheating behavior.

To understand when, how, and why people cheat, the ability to detect cheating in a laboratory setting is crucial. However, commonly used paradigms are confronted with a conflict between allowing participants to believe they can cheat unnoticed and allowing experimenters to detect cheating. This project aimed to develop and establish a new nonverbal task to resolve this conflict. Study 1 and Study 2 developed a new unsolvable paradigm called the Difference Spotting Task. In Study 1, participants were incentivized to indicate whether they found any difference between a pair of pictures without being asked to point the difference(s) out, so they could overreport their performance to earn extra money. Unbeknownst to them, the pairs of pictures from half of the items were identical so that the task could not be solved without cheating. This paradigm allowed experimenters to detect cheating for each unsolvable item. Study 3 examined the validity of the Difference Spotting Task and demonstrated it as a valid tool to assess cheating. The Difference Spotting Task is nonverbal and thus applicable to populations across age, educational level, and culture. In this unsolvable task, participants feel safe in cheating, and experimenters can detect cheating at the item level. The task holds the potential to gain acceptance by many researchers and facilitate the investigation of the underlying processes of cheating behavior.

The strength of a remorseful heart: psychological and neural basis of how apology emolliates reactive aggression and promotes forgiveness.

Apology from the offender facilitates forgiveness and thus has the power to restore a broken relationship. Here we showed that apology from the offender not only reduces the victim's propensity to react aggressively but also alters the victim's implicit attitude and neural responses toward the offender. We adopted an interpersonal competitive game which consisted of two phases. In the first, "passive" phase, participants were punished by high or low pain stimulation chosen by the opponents when losing a trial. During the break, participants received a note from each of the opponents, one apologizing and the other not. The second, "active" phase, involved a change of roles where participants could punish the two opponents after winning. Experiment 1 included an Implicit Association Test (IAT) in between the reception of notes and the second phase. Experiment 2 recorded participants' brain potentials in the second phase. We found that participants reacted less aggressively toward the apologizing opponent than the non-apologizing opponent in the active phase. Moreover, female, but not male, participants responded faster in the IAT when positive and negative words were associated with the apologizing and the non-apologizing opponents, respectively, suggesting that female participants had enhanced implicit attitude toward the apologizing opponent. Furthermore, the late positive potential (LPP), a component in brain potentials associated with affective/motivational reactions, was larger when viewing the portrait of the apologizing than the non-apologizing opponent when participants subsequently selected low punishment. Additionally, the LPP elicited by the apologizing opponents' portrait was larger in the female than in the male participants. These findings confirm the apology's role in reducing reactive aggression and further reveal that this forgiveness process engages, at least in female, an enhancement of the victim's implicit attitude and a prosocial motivational change toward the offender.