Behavioral dishonesty in multiscenes: Associations with trait honesty and neural patterns during (dis)honesty video-watching.

Cross-situational inconsistency is common in the expression of honesty traits; yet, there is insufficient emphasis on behavioral dishonesty across multiple contexts. The current study aimed to investigate behavioral dishonesty in various contexts and reveal the associations between trait honesty, behavioral dishonesty, and neural patterns of observing others behave honestly or dishonestly in videos (abbr.: (dis)honesty video-watching). First, the results revealed limitations in using trait honesty to reflect variations in dishonest behaviors and predict behavioral dishonesty. The finding highlights the importance of considering neural patterns in understanding and predicting dishonest behaviors. Second, by comparing the predictive performance of seven types of data across three neural networks, the results showed that functional connectivity in the hypothesis-driven network during (dis)honesty video-watching provided the highest predictive power in predicting multitask behavioral dishonesty. Last, by applying the feature elimination method, the midline self-referential regions (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex), anterior insula, and striatum were identified as the most informative brain regions in predicting behavioral dishonesty. In summary, the study offered insights into individual differences in deception and the intricate connections among trait honesty, behavioral dishonesty, and neural patterns during (dis)honesty video-watching.

High consistency of cheating and honesty in early childhood.

Three preregistered studies examined whether 5-year-old children cheat consistently or remain honest across multiple math tests. We observed high consistency in both honesty and cheating. All children who cheated on the first test continued cheating on subsequent tests, with shorter cheating latencies over time. In contrast, 77% of initially honest children maintained honesty despite repeated failure to complete the tests successfully. A brief integrity intervention helped initially honest children remain honest but failed to dissuade initially cheating children from cheating. These findings demonstrate that cheating emerges early and persists strongly in young children, underscoring the importance of early prevention efforts. They also suggest that bolstering honesty from the start may be more effective than attempting to remedy cheating after it has occurred. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS: Our research examines whether 5-year-old children, once they have started cheating, will continue to do so consistently. We also investigate whether 5-year-old children who are initially honest will continue to be honest subsequently. We discovered high consistency in both honesty and cheating among 5-year-old children. Almost all the children who initially cheated continued this behavior, while those who were honest stayed honest. A brief integrity-boosting intervention successfully helped 5-year-old children maintain their honesty. However, the same intervention failed to deter cheaters from cheating again. These findings underscore the importance of implementing integrity intervention as early as possible, potentially before children have had their first experience of cheating.

Alternative Systems: The Interplay Between Criminal Groups' Influence and Political Trust on Civic Honesty in the Global Context.

Individuals' endorsement of standards of civic honesty is necessary for democracies to flourish. A critical driver of civic honesty is the relationship of trust between individuals and institutions. Research has yet to systematically assess the contextual factors that may moderate this relationship. In this study, we examined the societal influence of organized criminal groups. Criminal groups operate as alternative systems of authority that erode the reliability of institutions' moral standards. We employed a new indicator that quantifies their societal influence to test the hypothesis that the association between individuals' political trust and civic honesty would weaken in countries more strongly affected by criminal groups. Multilevel evidence across 83 representative national samples (N = 128,839) supported this hypothesis. Moreover, the association between political trust and civic honesty was negative in contexts where criminal groups' influence was more extreme. We discuss the implications of the findings and future research directions.

Cue-driven microbial cooperation and communication: evolving quorum sensing with honest signaling.

BACKGROUND: Quorum sensing (QS) is the ability of microorganisms to assess local clonal density by measuring the extracellular concentration of signal molecules that they produce and excrete. QS is also the only known way of bacterial communication that supports the coordination of within-clone cooperative actions requiring a certain threshold density of cooperating cells. Cooperation aided by QS communication is sensitive to cheating in two different ways: laggards may benefit from not investing in cooperation but enjoying the benefit provided by their cooperating neighbors, whereas Liars explicitly promise cooperation but fail to do so, thereby convincing potential cooperating neighbors to help them, for almost free. Given this double vulnerability to cheats, it is not trivial why QS-supported cooperation is so widespread among prokaryotes. RESULTS: We investigated the evolutionary dynamics of QS in populations of cooperators for whom the QS signal is an inevitable side effect of producing the public good itself (cue-based QS). Using spatially explicit agent-based lattice simulations of QS-aided threshold cooperation (whereby cooperation is effective only above a critical cumulative level of contributions) and three different (analytical and numerical) approximations of the lattice model, we explored the dynamics of QS-aided threshold cooperation under a feasible range of parameter values. We demonstrate three major advantages of cue-driven cooperation. First, laggards cannot wipe out cooperation under a wide range of reasonable environmental conditions, in spite of an unconstrained possibility to mutate to cheating; in fact, cooperators may even exclude laggards at high cooperation thresholds. Second, lying almost never pays off, if the signal is an inevitable byproduct (i.e., the cue) of cooperation; even very cheap fake signals are selected against. And thirdly, QS is most useful if local cooperator densities are the least predictable, i.e., if their lattice-wise mean is close to the cooperation threshold with a substantial variance. CONCLUSIONS: Comparing the results of the four different modeling approaches indicates that cue-driven threshold cooperation may be a viable evolutionary strategy for microbes that cannot keep track of past behavior of their potential cooperating partners, in spatially viscous and in well-mixed environments alike. Our model can be seen as a version of the famous greenbeard effect, where greenbeards coexist with defectors in a evolutionarily stable polymorphism. Such polymorphism is maintained by the condition-dependent trade-offs of signal production which are characteristic of cue-based QS.

When liars are considered honest.

This article introduces a theoretical model of truth and honesty from a psychological perspective. We examine its application in political discourse and discuss empirical findings distinguishing between conceptions of honesty and their influence on public perception, misinformation dissemination, and the integrity of democracy.

Young children with higher verbal intelligence are less likely to cheat.

Cheating is a pervasive unethical behavior. Existing research involving young children has mainly focused on contextual factors affecting cheating behavior, whereas cognitive factors have been relatively understudied. This study investigated the unique role of verbal and performance intelligence on young children's cheating behavior (N = 50; mean age = 5.73 years; 25 boys). Bootstrapping hierarchical logistic regression showed that children's Verbal IQ scores were significantly and negatively correlated with their cheating behavior above and beyond the contributions of age, gender, and Performance IQ scores. Children with higher Verbal IQ scores were less inclined to cheat. However, neither children's Performance IQ nor their Total IQ scores had a significant and unique correlation with cheating. These findings suggest that intelligence plays a significant role in children's cheating but that this role is limited to verbal intelligence only. In addition, this study highlights the need for researchers to go beyond the contextual factors to study the early development of cheating behavior.

No effect of testosterone or sexual ornamentation on telomere dynamics: A case study and meta-analyses.

Life-history theory predicts that reproductive investments are traded-off against self-maintenance. Telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes, offer a promising avenue for assessing life-history trade-offs, as they shorten in response to stressors and are predictive of the remaining lifespan. In males, testosterone frequently mediates life-history trade-offs, in part, through its effects on sexual ornamentation, which is an important aspect of reproductive investment. However, studies of within-individual associations between telomere dynamics and sexual ornamentation are limited in number and have produced mixed results. Furthermore, most such studies have been observational, making it difficult to discern the nature of any causal relationship. To address this, we used short-acting testosterone implants in free-living male superb fairy-wrens (Malurus cyaneus) to stimulate the production of a sexual ornament: early moult into a costly blue breeding plumage. We found no evidence that elevated testosterone, and the consequent earlier moult into breeding plumage, accelerated telomere shortening. We therefore followed up with a systematic review and two meta-analyses (28 studies, 54 effect sizes) exploring the associations between telomeres and (1) testosterone and (2) sexual ornamentation. In line with our experimental findings, neither meta-analysis showed an overall correlation of testosterone or sexual ornamentation with telomere length or telomere dynamics. However, meta-regression showed that experimental, compared to observational, studies reported greater evidence of trade-offs. Our meta-analyses highlight the need for further experimental studies to better understand potential responses of telomere length or telomere dynamics to testosterone or sexual ornamentation.

Cognitive control in honesty and dishonesty under different conflict scenarios: insights from reaction time.

This study investigated the role of cognitive control in moral decision-making, focusing on conflicts between financial temptations and the integrity of honesty. We employed a perceptual task by asking participants to identify which side of the diagonal contained more red dots within a square to provoke both honest and dishonest behaviors, tracking their reaction times (RTs). Participants encountered situations with no conflict, ambiguous conflict, and clear conflict. Their behaviors in the clear conflict condition categorized them as either "honest" or "dishonest." Our findings suggested that, in ambiguous conflict situations, honest individuals had significantly longer RTs and fewer self-interest responses than their dishonest counterparts, suggesting a greater need for cognitive control to resolve conflicts and a lesser tendency toward self-interest. Moreover, a negative correlation was found between participants' number of self-interest responses and RTs in ambiguous conflict situations (r = -0.27 in study 1 and r = -0.66 in study 2), and a positive correlation with cheating numbers in clear conflict situations (r = 0.36 in study 1 and r = 0.82 in study 2). This suggests less cognitive control was required for self-interest and cheating responses, bolstering the "Will" hypothesis. We also found that a person's self-interest tendency could predict their dishonest behavior. These insights extend our understanding of the role of cognitive control plays in honesty and dishonesty, with potential applications in education, policy-making, and business ethics.

The Connection between Neurophysiological Correlates of Trust and Distrust and Isolated HEXACO Dimensions.

Trust and distrust are constructs that have provoked and undergone lots of discussion in the fields of sociology and psychology. However, to our knowledge, there is little agreement about how these constructs should be treated in the future. The present study tries to help in this discussion by re-analyzing prior neurophysiological data highlighting differences between trust and distrust by connecting these data with two distinct personality dimensions. Thus, the objective was to analyze the connection between neurophysiological trust/distrust processing and distinct HEXACO personality dimensions. Differences were found in the event-related potentials (ERPs) calculated for visual presentations of political institution words and brand names, which were evaluated with respect to trust and distrust by button presses. Two time points (330 ms and 780 ms) showed brain activity differences between trust and distrust related to the two word categories at frontal electrode locations. For this study, these findings were taken and connected to HEXACO-60 personality inventory results collected from prior participants. Statistical analysis revealed a significant interaction between the ERPs and two HEXACO personality dimensions concerning trusted brands at the later time point (780 ms) at the right frontal electrode location F8. This result is taken as neurophysiological evidence that parameter values of the personality traits honesty-humility and agreeableness have an influence on brain functions related to trusted brands.

Lying to recommend unqualified friends: Diverging implications for interpersonal and epistemic trust inferences.

When people are asked to recommend individuals they care about, they often grapple with conflicts regarding the level of honesty they should maintain when being truthful could potentially hinder those individuals' chances of receiving beneficial opportunities. In the current study, we examined how adolescents evaluate people based on how they respond to such dilemmas, with a focus on how it affects judgments of interpersonal and epistemic trustworthiness. We tested a sample of high school students in the southwestern United States (N = 78; Mage = 16.45 years), who were asked about a moral dilemma in which a story character needed to decide whether to recommend an unqualified friend. We experimentally manipulated whether the friend was very close to the standard (requiring a small exaggeration) or was far from the standard (requiring a large exaggeration) between participants. Across both exaggeration conditions, we observed a dissociation in judgments of epistemic and interpersonal trustworthiness: Lie-tellers were judged to be more interpersonally trustworthy than epistemically trustworthy, whereas truth-tellers were judged to be more epistemically trustworthy than interpersonally trustworthy. These results show that adolescents are capable of using information about an individual's lie-telling versus truth-telling decisions to make highly nuanced social inferences.

Relationship between acoustic traits of protesting cries of domestic kittens (Felis catus) and their individual chances for survival.

Domestic cat (Felis catus) mothers may rely on offspring cries to allocate resources in use of individuals with greater chances for survival and sacrifice the weak ones in case of impossibility to raise the entire large litter. Potential victims of this maternal strategy can enhance their chances of survival, by producing vocalizations with traits mimicking those of higher-quality offspring. We compared acoustic traits of 4990 cries produced during blood sampling by 57 two-week-old captive feral kittens (28 males, 29 females); 47 of them survived to 90 days of age and 10 died by reasons not related to traumas or aggression. No relationship was found between acoustic parameters and kitten survival, however, positive relationship was found between survival and body weight. The cries had moderate cues to individuality and lacked cues to sex. Body weight correlated positively with fundamental frequency and negatively with call rate, duration, peak frequency and power quartiles. We discuss that dishonesty of acoustic traits of kitten quality could develop as adaptation for misleading a mother from allocation resources between the weaker and stronger individuals, thus enhancing individual chances for survival for the weaker littermates. Physical constraint, as body weight, may prevent extensive developing the deceptive vocal traits.

Parenting by Lying.

Parenting by lying is a practice in which parents lie to their children to influence their emotions or behavior. Recently, researchers have tried to document the nature of this phenomenon and to understand its causes and consequences. The present research provides an overview of the research in the emerging field, describes some key theoretical and methodological challenges in studying this topic, and proposes a theoretical framework for understanding parenting by lying and for guiding future research to advance our knowledge about this understudied parenting practice.

Self-efficacy and cheating among young children.

This research, comprising three preregistered studies, investigated the link between self-efficacy and cheating on an academic test in 5- and 6-year-old children. Study 1 assessed children's general self-efficacy and found it to be unrelated to their cheating behavior. Study 2 assessed task-specific self-efficacy, which was not found to be associated with cheating. In Study 3, children were randomly assigned to either an experimental group, which received brief positive feedback on task-specific self-efficacy, or a control group, which received no feedback. The experimental group demonstrated significantly less cheating. These findings, for the first time, identify a specific connection between young children's self-efficacy and academic dishonesty and suggest that positive feedback on task-specific efficacy could be a simple effective strategy for fostering academic integrity early on.

The ethics of expert communication.

Despite its public visibility and impact on policy, the activity of expert communication rarely receives more than a passing mention in codes of scientific integrity. This paper makes the case for an ethics of expert communication, introducing a framework where expert communication is represented as an intrinsically ethical activity of a deliberative agent. Ethical expert communication cannot be ensured by complying with various requirements, such as restricting communications to one's area of expertise or disclosing conflicts of interest. Expert communication involves morally laden trade-offs that must be weighed by a deliberative agent. A basic normative framework is introduced, and concrete provisions are proposed for codes of scientific integrity.

An Egalitarian Perspective on Information Sharing: The Example of Health Care Priorities.

In health care, the provision of pertinent information to patients is not just a moral imperative but also a legal obligation, often articulated through the lens of obtaining informed consent. Codes of medical ethics and many national laws mandate the disclosure of basic information about diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment alternatives. However, within publicly funded health care systems, other kinds of information might also be important to patients, such as insights into the health care priorities that underlie treatment offers made. While conventional perspectives do not take this as an obligatory part of the information to be shared with patients, perhaps through viewing it as clinically "non-actionable," we advocate for a paradigm shift. Our proposition diverges from the traditional emphasis on actionability. We contend that honoring patients as equal moral agents necessitates, among other principles, a commitment to honesty. Withholding specific categories of information pertinent to patients' comprehension of their situation is inherently incompatible with this principle. In this article, we advocate for a recalibration of the burden of proof. Rather than requiring special justifications for adding to the standard set of information items, we suggest that physicians should be able to justify excluding relevant facts about the patient's situation and the underlying considerations shaping health care professionals' choices. This perspective prioritizes transparency and empowers patients with a comprehensive understanding, aligning with the ethos of respect for the patient as person.

Survey Uses May Influence Survey Responses.

Traditional validation processes for psychological surveys tend to focus on analyzing item responses instead of the cognitive processes that participants use to generate these responses. When screening for invalid responses, researchers typically focus on participants who manipulate their answers for personal gain or respond carelessly. In this paper, we introduce a new invalid response process, discordant responding, that arises when participants disagree with the use of the survey and discuss similarities and differences between this response style and protective responding. Results show that nearly all participants reflect on the intended uses of an assessment when responding to items and may decline to respond or modify their responses if they are not comfortable with the way the results will be used. Incidentally, we also find that participants may misread survey instructions if they are not interactive. We introduce a short screener to detect invalid responses, the discordant response identifiers (DRI), which provides researchers with a simple validity tool to use when validating surveys. Finally, we provide recommendations about how researchers may use these findings to design surveys that reduce this response manipulation in the first place.

Truthfulness Predominates in Americans' Conceptualizations of Honesty: A Prototype Analysis.

Honesty is a near universally valued trait. However, the term honesty captures a litany of traits and behaviors, obscuring research on social perceptions and trait measurement of honesty and creating philosophical difficulties in accounting for what (if anything) unifies this diversity. We applied a prototype analysis approach to identify the most central elements of lay honesty conceptualizations, identifying elements that come to mind and are explicitly acknowledged as important to honesty. In five studies (N = 1,442), U.S. American participants generated 6,000+ free responses characterizing honesty and indicated which subtraits and behaviors best represent honesty. Truthfulness was most central to lay honesty conceptualizations across all studies and several centrality indices (frequency among responses and participants, agreement across participants, priority in lists, explicit ratings), though several other features were prominent. Findings illuminate social perceptions of honesty, critique popular measurement of trait honesty, and offer empirical foundations for philosophical analysis of honesty.

Assessing the self-reported honesty threshold in adolescent epidemiological research: comparing supervised machine learning and inferential statistical techniques.

BACKGROUND: Epidemiological surveys offer essential data on adolescent substance use. Nevertheless, the precision of these self-report-based surveys often faces mistrust from researchers and the public. We evaluate the efficacy of a direct method to assess data quality by asking adolescents if they were honest. The main goal of our study was to assess the accuracy of a self-report honesty item and designate an optimal threshold for it, allowing us to better account for its impact on point estimates. METHODS: The participants were from the 2020 Illinois Youth Survey, a self-report school-based survey. We divided the primary dataset into subsets based on responses to an honesty item. Then, for each dataset, we examined two distinct data analysis methodologies: supervised machine learning, using the random forest algorithm, and a conventional inferential statistical method, logistic regression. We evaluated item thresholds from both analyses, investigating probable relationships with reported fake drug use, social desirability biases, and missingness in the datasets. RESULTS: The study results corroborate the appropriateness and reliability of the honesty item and its corresponding threshold. These contain the agreeing honesty thresholds determined in both data analyses, the identified association between reported fake drug use and lower honesty scores, increased missingness and lower honesty, and the determined link between the social desirability bias and honesty threshold. CONCLUSIONS: Confirming the honesty threshold via missing data analysis also strengthens these collective findings, emphasizing our methodology's and findings' robustness. Researchers are encouraged to use self-report honesty items in epidemiological research. This will permit the modeling of accurate point estimates by addressing questionable reporting.

The Ethics of Publishing Biomedical and Natural Products Research.

Given that the essence of Science is a search for the truth, one might expect that those identifying as scientists would be conscientious and observant of the demands this places on them. However, that expectation is not fulfilled universally as, not too surprisingly, egregious examples of unethical behavior appear and are driven by money, personal ambition, performance pressure, and other incentives. The reproducibility-, fact-, and truth-oriented modus operandi of Science has come to face a variety of challenges. Organized into 11 cases, this article outlines examples of compromised integrity from borderline to blatant unethical behavior that disgrace our profession unnecessarily. Considering technological developments in neural networks/artificial intelligence, a host of factors are identified as impacting Good Ethical Practices. The goal is manifold: to raise awareness and offer perspectives for refocusing on Science and true scientific evidence; to trigger discussion and developments that strengthen ethical behavior; to foster the recognition of the beauty, simplicity, and rewarding nature of scientific integrity; and to highlight the originality of intelligence.