Dishonesty is an intriguing phenomenon, studied extensively across various disciplines due to its impact on people's lives as well as society in general. To examine dishonesty in a controlled setting, researchers have developed a number of experimental paradigms. One of the most popular approaches in this regard, is the matrix task, in which participants receive matrices wherein they have to find two numbers that sum to 10 (e.g., 4.81 and 5.19), under time pressure. In a next phase, participants need to report how many matrices they had solved correctly, allowing them the opportunity to cheat by exaggerating their performance in order to get a larger reward. Here, we argue, both on theoretical and empirical grounds, that the matrix task is ill-suited to study dishonest behavior, primarily because it conflates cheating with honest mistakes. We therefore recommend researchers to use different paradigms to examine dishonesty, and treat (previous) findings based on the matrix task with due caution.
This study aims to assess the reliability and the validity of exemplar similarity derived from category fluency tasks. A homogeneous sample of 21 healthy participants completed a category fluency task twice with an interval of one week. They also rated pairs comprised of the most frequently generated exemplars in terms of similarity. Similarities were derived from the fluency data by determining the average distance between generated exemplars and correcting it for repetitions and response sequence length. We calculated the correlation between the similarities derived from the two sessions of the fluency task and between the derived similarities and the directly rated similarities. Spatial representations of the similarities were constructed using multidimensional scaling to visualize the differences between both sessions of the fluency task and the pairwise rating task. We find that the derived similarities are not stable in time and show little correspondence with directly rated similarities. The differences between similarities derived from category fluency tasks in healthy participants, indicate that similar differences between healthy controls and patients with mental disorders, do not necessarily point to a semantic impairment of the latter, but rather reflect the unreliability of the data.
Naming patterns of bilinguals have been found to converge and form a new intermediate language system from elements of both the bilinguals’ languages. This converged naming pattern differs from the monolingual naming patterns of both a bilingual’s languages. We conducted a pre-registered replication study of experiments addressing the question whether there is a convergence between a bilingual’s both lexicons. The replication used an enlarged set of stimuli of common household containers, providing generalizability, and more reliable representations of the semantic domain. Both an analysis at the group-level and at the individual level of the correlations between naming patterns reject the two-pattern hypothesis that poses that bilinguals use two monolingual-like naming patterns, one for each of their two languages. However, the results of the original study and the replication comply with the one-pattern hypothesis, which poses that bilinguals converge the naming patterns of their two languages and form a compromise. Since this convergence is only partial the naming pattern in bilinguals corresponds to a moderate version of the one-pattern hypothesis. These findings are further confirmed by a representation of the semantic domain in a multidimensional space and the finding of shorter distances between bilingual category centers than monolingual category centers in this multidimensional space both in the original and in the replication study.
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