Life abounds with situations in which we must decide whether to act unethically for personal gain or to be prosocial, thus maintaining a positive image of ourselves as being a ‘good person’. Evidence suggests that acute stress may influence moral decisions and prosocial behavior. However, it is currently unclear whether stress increases or decreases immoral behavior. Here, we hypothesize that stress, through its effects on cognitive control, has different effects on moral decision making for different individuals, depending on their moral default. We test this hypothesis by combining a task which allows for inconspicuously measuring spontaneous cheating with a well-established stress induction task. Our findings confirm our hypothesis, revealing that effects of stress on dishonesty are not uniform, but instead depend on the individual: for those who are relatively dishonest, stress increases dishonesty, whereas for participants who are relatively honest stress does not increase dishonesty and perhaps makes them even slightly more honest. These findings go a long way in resolving the conflicting findings in the literature on the effects of stress on prosocial behavior, suggesting that stress affects prosocial behavior differently for different individuals, depending on their moral default.
Trajectories of attention capture the accumulation of brand utility during complex decision-making tasks. Thus, attention trajectories, as reflected in eye movements, predict the final brand choice of 85% of consumers before they implement it. Even when observing eye movements in only the first quarter of the decision process, attention already predicts brand choice much better (45%) than chance levels (20%). This superior prediction performance is due to a “double attention lift” for the chosen brand. Thus, the chosen brand receives progressively more attention towards the moment of choice, and more of this attention is devoted to integrating information about the brand rather than to comparing it with other options. In contrast, the currently owned brand grabs attention early in the task, and its attention gain persists for brand-loyal and shifts for brand-switching consumers. A new attention-and-choice model used in tandem with the Bayesian K-fold Cross-Validation methodology on eye-tracking data from 325 representative consumers uncovered these attention trajectory effects. The findings contribute to closing important knowledge gaps in the attention and choice literature and have implications for marketing research and managerial practice.
In behavioural, cognitive, and social sciences, reaction time measures are an important source of information. However, analyses on reaction time data are affected by researchers’ analytical choices and the order in which these choices are applied. The results of a systematic literature review, presented in this paper, revealed that the justification for and order in which analytical choices are conducted are rarely reported, leading to difficulty in reproducing results and interpreting mixed findings. To address this methodological shortcoming, we created a checklist on reporting reaction time pre-processing to make these decisions more explicit, improve transparency, and thus promote best practices within the field. The importance of the pre-processing checklist was additionally supported by an expert consensus survey. Consequently, we appeal for maximal transparency on all methods applied and offer a checklist to improve replicability and reproducibility of studies that use reaction time measures.
In daily life we regularly must decide whether to act dishonestly for personal gain or to be honest and maintain a positive image of ourselves. While evidence suggests that acute stress influences moral decisions, it is unclear whether stress increases or decreases immoral behavior. Here, we hypothesize that stress, through its effects on cognitive control, has different effects on moral decision making for different individuals, depending on their moral default. We test this hypothesis by combining a task which allows for inconspicuously measuring spontaneous cheating with a well-established stress induction task. Our findings confirm our hypothesis, revealing that effects of stress on dishonesty are not uniform, but instead depend on the individual: for those who are relatively dishonest, stress increases dishonesty, whereas for participants who are relatively honest stress makes them more honest. These findings go a long way in resolving the conflicting findings in the literature on the effects of stress on moral decisions, suggesting that stress affects dishonesty differently for different individuals, depending on their moral default.
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