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

Abstract

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.

Morality in the flesh: on the link between bodily self-consciousness, moral identity and (dis)honest behaviour

“…five) represents an important, ethical limitation of our two studies. However, and as also highlighted by Liu and colleagues for a similar task [ 47 ], the alternative, truthful version of our STDT would have to rely on images that differ for a certain number of details, a proportion of which is very difficult (but not impossible) to find. While this methodology would eliminate deception on the part of researchers, it would also prevent them from recognizing participants who lie and those who do not with absolute certainty, and therefore from studying dishonest behaviours in similar settings.…”

“…It is worth noting that different versions of the STDT were recently used to investigate dishonesty [ 46 , 47 ] and unveil its underlying neural correlates [ 48 ]. Crucially, this task has the advantage of being nonverbal, which allows us to investigate moral behaviours in populations differing in age and education.…”

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

“…The single‐player task adopted a 2 (8 s vs. 60 s time‐limit) × 2 (self or charity as beneficiaries) design. There were 60 trials covering four types of puzzles: the adding‐to‐10 matrix puzzle (Mazar et al, 2008 ; Zhong et al, 2010 ), the difference spotting puzzle (Liu et al, 2021 ; Speer et al, 2020 ), the Chinese idioms puzzle, and the logic reasoning puzzle (the control puzzle to disguise the experiment as a test of measuring problem‐solving ability). Before the experiment, participants were informed that they were participating in a problem‐solving task.…”

Table_1.DOCX

“…Commonly used measures to identify dishonesty at an individual level include ability tests, such as the matrix task (Mazar et al, 2008), where self-reported outcomes are compared to the actual performances, deception games, or unsolvable paradigms. In unsolvable paradigms, participants are asked to indicate whether they solved a specific task, even though the tasks are designed to be unsolvable (Liu et al, 2021). Examples such as "senderreceiver" games or "tax compliance" experiments are utilized to detect deceptive behavior in either interactive and non-interactive communication settings (Burgoon and Buller, 1994;Capraro, 2018).…”

“…Examples such as "senderreceiver" games or "tax compliance" experiments are utilized to detect deceptive behavior in either interactive and non-interactive communication settings (Burgoon and Buller, 1994;Capraro, 2018). Despite some drawbacks (see Heyman et al, 2020;Liu et al, 2021or Blume et al, 2002 for further information), these approaches allow for direct inferences about individual behavior, making them essential for accurately linking personal factors to dishonesty. One of the rarely discussed drawbacks of tasks like the matrix task is the occurrence of honest mistakes (Heyman et al, 2020).…”