Anna Foerster

Pushing the rules: effects and aftereffects of deliberate rule violations

Most of our daily life is organized around rules and social norms. But what makes rules so special? And what if one were to break a rule intentionally? Can we simply free us from the present set of rules or do we automatically adhere to them? How do rule violations influence subsequent behavior? To investigate the effects and aftereffects of violating simple S-R rule, we conducted three experiments that investigated continuous finger-tracking responses on an iPad. Our experiments show that rule violations are distinct from rule-based actions in both response times and movement trajectories, they take longer to initiate and execute, and their movement trajectory is heavily contorted. Data not only show differences between the two types of response (rule-based vs. violation), but also yielded a characteristic pattern of aftereffects in case of rule violations: rule violations do not trigger adaptation effects that render further rule violations less difficult, but every rule violation poses repeated effort on the agent. The study represents a first step towards understanding the signature and underlying mechanisms of deliberate rule violations, they cannot be acted out by themselves, but require the activation of the original rule first. Consequently, they are best understood as reformulations of existing rules that are not accessible on their own, but need to be constantly derived from the original rule, with an add-on that might entail an active tendency to steer away from mental representations that reflect (socially) unwanted behavior.

Honesty saves time (and justifications).

The study of active lying poses considerable methodological challenges, especially regarding suitable experimental designs to prompt dishonest responses. This aim is often achieved by instructing participants whether to lie or to be honest in a given situation (e.g., Spence et al., 2001; Walczyk et al., 2003). Shalvi and colleagues have recently promoted a striking alternative approach which allows studying spontaneous lies: the die under cup paradigm (Shalvi et al., 2011, 2012; cf. Fischbacher and Heusi, 2008). In this paradigm, participants roll a die, report the outcome anonymously, and receive payment depending on their roll. Though it is not possible to determine whether a given participant is lying or not, the distribution of outcomes indicates whether participants tend to report higher numbers than expected by chance. Shalvi et al. (2012) modified this paradigm to investigate situational determinants of self-serving lies. In their Experiment 1, participants were to roll a die three times and to report the outcome of the first roll afterward. Importantly, they either worked at their own pace or had to complete the three rolls within 20 s (to induce time pressure). Participants were more honest in the self-paced condition than in the time pressure condition, which led the authors to suggest that lying is an initial, automatic tendency that is overcome only if sufficient time to deliberate is available and if unethical behavior cannot be justified. These conclusions are surprising because a substantial body of research seems to suggest the very opposite: numerous studies found lying to be cognitively more demanding than responding honestly and, consequently, honesty is typically seen as a behavioral default (e.g., Spence et al., 2001, 2004; Walczyk et al., 2003, 2009; Debey et al., 2012). Further supporting this view, honest answers seem to be actively inhibited during lying (Spence et al., 2001; Nunez et al., 2005). These findings challenge the interpretations of Shalvi et al. (2012), and we propose that certain peculiarities of the die under cup paradigm are responsible for the diverging results. As a central feature of the die under cup paradigm, participants can—in principle—generate their response before actually rolling the die. This procedure is markedly different from other approaches where an answers appropriateness and truthfulness depend on the specific question that is asked in a trial (e.g., Spence et al., 2001). Here, the answer can be generated only after the question is asked. These latter designs might thus be better suited to address the automaticity of lying because they tap directly onto the time it takes to generate dishonest and truthful responses. The die under cup paradigm, however, can be modified to address automaticity more directly as well. Accordingly, we varied the time available for reflection about the (dis)honesty of the reports on two levels: individual die rolls and blocks of rolls. The available time between individual die rolls and reports was manipulated by asking participants either to report the number immediately (immediate report condition) or after a short delay (delayed report condition). This delay was implemented by asking participants to report only after continuing to shake the cup (Figure ​(Figure1A).1A). The time available at the level of blocks of rolls was manipulated by having participants run through each condition not only once but repeatedly before and after a short break. Each of these rolls is statistically independent of preceding and subsequent tosses, and hence has always the same expected value. Consequently, any above chance variation of reported numbers over time (i.e., before and after the break) must originate from the human observer. Thus, assessing the time course of reported outcomes provides a novel measure of dishonesty in addition to the mean outcome that has been used previously. Figure 1 Design and results. (A) Procedure of the immediate (top) and the delayed report condition (bottom); the experimenter announced the current condition, and participants reported the outcome of three rolls of an eight-sided die. Both conditions were repeated ... Thirty-two participants (mean age: 24.9 years) joined the game and were informed that they could earn up to 2.50€ depending on the total of 12 rolls with an eight-sided die. They started either with the immediate report condition or the delayed report condition (three rolls) and continued with the remaining condition (three rolls). Crucially, this sequence was repeated after a short break. We had to discard the data of four participants due to procedural errors, leaving data of 28 × 12 = 336 rolls. Participants reported higher numbers in the delayed report condition than in the immediate report condition in the first experimental half, but not in the second half (see Figure ​Figure1B).1B). This observation was confirmed by a 2 × 2 repeated-measures analysis of variance with the factors condition (immediate vs. delayed report) and experimental half (1st vs. 2nd) that was run on the mean outcomes. Most notably, the interaction of condition and experimental half was significant, F(1, 27) = 4.96, p = 0.034, η2p = 0.16, whereas neither main effect approached significance; condition: F(1, 27) = 2.20, p = 0.149, η2p = 0.08; experimental half: F < 1. Tested separately, only the mean outcome of the delayed report condition in the first half differed from chance level (4.5), t(27) = 2.28, p = 0.031, d = 0.43. These results challenge the interpretations of Shalvi et al. (2012) and suggest spontaneous responses to be quite honest whereas only delayed responses foster self-serving behavior. On a larger timescale, however, time for reasoning (after the first experimental half) seems to counteract dishonest responses again. Thus, dishonest responses do not seem to be a truly automatic tendency but rather do they take more time and cognitive effort than truthful responses. In the light of previous research on lying (Spence et al., 2001; Walczyk et al., 2003) and on spontaneous tendencies to co-operate rather than compete with others (Rand et al., 2012), we thus believe that lying is currently best be seen not as “a dark side of human automatic tendencies” (Shalvi et al., 2012, p. 1269) but rather as the dark side of human deliberation.

Pants on fire: The electrophysiological signature of telling a lie

Even though electroencephalography has played a prominent role for lie detection via personally relevant information, the electrophysiological signature of active lying is still elusive. We addressed this signature with two experiments in which participants helped a virtual police officer to locate a knife. Crucially, before this response, they announced whether they would lie or tell the truth about the knife’s location. This design allowed us to study the signature of lie-telling in the absence of rare and personally significant oddball stimuli that are typically used for lie detection via electrophysiological markers, especially the P300 component. Our results indicate that active lying attenuated P300 amplitudes as well as N200 amplitudes for such non-oddball stimuli. These results support accounts that stress the high cognitive demand of lie-telling, including the need to suppress the truthful response and to generate a lie.

The dishonest mind set in sequence

Dishonest responding is an important part of the behavioral repertoire and perfectly integrated in communication and daily actions. Thus, previous research aimed at uncovering the cognitive mechanisms underlying dishonest responding by studying its immediate behavioral effects. A comprehensive account of the aftereffects of this type of behavior has not been presented to date, however. Based on the methods and theories from research on task switching, we, therefore, explored the notion of honest and dishonest responding as two distinct intentional sets. In four experiments, participants responded either honestly or dishonestly to simple yes/no questions. Crucially, robust switch costs were found between honest and dishonest responding when questions succeeded promptly (Exp. 1) but also when an unrelated task intervened between questions (Exp. 2). Surprisingly, responding dishonestly to a question also affected responses in the subsequent intervening task in terms of a more liberal response criterion. Time to prepare for the upcoming intentional set further induced asymmetrical switch costs (Exp. 3). Finally, a novel control condition (Exp. 4) allowed us to pinpoint most of the observed effects to negation processing as an inherent mechanism of dishonesty. The experiments shed new light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying dishonesty by providing strong support for the concept of distinct mental sets for honest and dishonest responding. The experiments further reveal that these mental sets are notably stable and are not disturbed by intervening task performance. The observed aftereffects of dishonest responding might also provide a potent extension to applied protocols for lie detection.

The electrophysiological signature of deliberate rule violations.

Humans follow rules by default, and violating even simple rules induces cognitive conflict for the rule breaker. Previous studies revealed this conflict in various behavioral measures, including response times and movement trajectories. Based on these experiments, we investigated the electrophysiological signature of deliberately violating a simple stimulus-response mapping rule. Such rule violations were characterized by a delayed and attenuated P300 component when evaluating a rule-relevant stimulus, most likely reflecting increased response complexity. This parietal attenuation was followed by a frontal positivity for rule violations relative to correct response trials. Together, these results reinforce previous findings on the need to inhibit automatic S-R translation when committing a rule violation, and they point toward additional factors involved in rule violation. Candidate processes such as negative emotional responses and increased monitoring should be targeted by future investigations.

Rule-violations sensitise towards negative and authority-related stimuli

ABSTRACT Rule violations have usually been studied from a third-person perspective, identifying situational factors that render violations more or less likely. A first-person perspective of the agent that actively violates the rules, on the other hand, is only just beginning to emerge. Here we show that committing a rule violation sensitises towards subsequent negative stimuli as well as subsequent authority-related stimuli. In a Prime-Probe design, we used an instructed rule-violation task as the Prime and a word categorisation task as the Probe. Also, we employed a control condition that used a rule inversion task as the Prime (instead of rule violations). Probe targets were categorised faster after a violation relative to after a rule-based response if they related to either, negative valence or authority. Inversions, however, primed only negative stimuli and did not accelerate the categorisation of authority-related stimuli. A heightened sensitivity towards authority-related targets thus seems to be specific to rule violations. A control experiment showed that these effects cannot be explained in terms of semantic priming. Therefore, we propose that rule violations necessarily activate authority-related representations that make rule violations qualitatively different from simple rule inversions.

Size estimates remain stable in the face of differences in performance outcome variability in an aiming task

In perceptual-motor tasks such as dart throwing, those who hit the target more successfully report the target to be bigger than those who hit less successfully. While initial evidence seemed to support the recent contention that the variability in performance (rather than the amount of successful hits) may scale reported target size, here we provide counterevidence for this hypothesis. We systematically manipulated performance outcomes in a shuffling task by means of magnetic fields. Participants were asked to slide a disk on a wooden board towards a circular target. Using a within-subjects design, in two conditions throw outcomes were manipulated to produce either high or low variability in performance outcome, while the mean success of performance (i.e., the mean error) remained constant across conditions. Despite the successful manipulations of high and low variability in the performance outcomes, results revealed that size estimates of the target remained stable.

This Is How To Be a Rule Breaker

Violating rules comes with cognitive conflict for the rule-breaker. Here, we probed for means to reduce the behavioral effects of this conflict by studying the combined impact of recency and frequency of rule violations. We found that violating a rule facilitated the initiation of a subsequent rule violation, while notable costs relative to rule-based responding remained in measures of response execution. Such costs during response execution vanished, however, when frequency and recency of rule violation worked in concert. That is, it is possible to overcome the costs of rule violation when (a) having violated this particular rule frequently and (b) having violated this particular rule very recently. Moreover, we demonstrated that recent rule violations reduce the costs of cognitive conflict in an unrelated interference task (Simon task). Based on these findings, we present a revised model of the cognitive processes underlying deliberate rule violations.

Commentary: Feeling the Conflict: The Crucial Role of Conflict Experience in Adaptation

A range of different effects from the original study can be considered for estimating an optimal sample size for a direct replication of Desender et al. (2014). These effects comprise the threeway interaction of current congruency, preceding congruency, and accuracy of the preceding rating for reaction times (RTs; dz = 0.30) and error percentages (PEs; dz = 0.47), and the robust congruency sequence effects after correct conflict ratings (RTs: dz = 0.45; PEs: dz = 0.45). Effect sizes were computed from the corresponding F-statistics and we chose to base our sample size on the lowest of these values (dz = 0.30). A sample size of 89 participants ensures a power of 80% to detect such an effect in a two-tailed test (with α = 5%; calculated with the power.t.test function in R3.1.0). This sample size also allows for sufficient power (> 90%) for the stronger effects even after a high expected dropout rate of 40% following the criteria of the original study. Three participants had to be excluded as their median RT exceeded the sample mean by two SDs. The remaining 86 participants (19 male) met the accuracy inclusion criterion (less than 25% errors; see below for exclusions based on trial numbers).

Conflict modification: predictable production of congruent situations facilitates responding in a stroop task

Humans cope with cognitive conflict in various ways, such as focusing on task-relevant instead of task-irrelevant information or avoiding situations where conflict is likely. These adaptations to conflict resemble those used to cope with negative affect. We examined whether situation modification, a strategy derived from the extended process model of emotion regulation, may influence responding in cognitive conflict tasks. This should be evident by a facilitation of actions that consistently modify situations towards congruent (positive) situations rather than to incongruent (negative) situations. In four experiments, participants modified stimuli in a color-word Stroop task towards congruent or incongruent stimuli of (un)predictable identity. A modification effect emerged insofar as participants were faster when they foreseeably produced congruent stimuli of predictable identity than when they produced incongruent stimuli or stimuli of unpredictable identity. Our results add to the body of evidence connecting affect and cognitive conflict, and reveal a constraint when using situation modification as a means to regulate cognitive conflict.