According to the previous literature, only a few papers found better accuracy than a chance to detect dishonesty, even when more information and verbal cues (VCs) improve precision in detecting dishonesty. A new classification of dishonesty profiles has recently been published, allowing us to study if this low success rate happens for all people or if some people have higher predictive ability. This paper aims to examine if (dis)honest people can detect better/worse (un)ethical behavior of others.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIn this paper we propose a new method of eliciting market research information. Instead of asking respondents for their personal choices and preferences, we ask respondents to predict the choices of other respondents to the survey. Such predictions tap respondents' knowledge of peers, whether based on direct social contacts or on more general cultural information.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe ability to 'sense' the social environment and thereby to understand the thoughts and actions of others allows humans to fit into their social worlds, communicate and cooperate, and learn from others' experiences. Here we argue that, through the lens of computational social science, this ability can be used to advance research into human sociality. When strategically selected to represent a specific population of interest, human social sensors can help to describe and predict societal trends.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCredit cards have often been blamed for consumer overspending and for the growth in household debt. Indeed, laboratory studies of purchase behavior have shown that credit cards can facilitate spending in ways that are difficult to justify on purely financial grounds. However, the psychological mechanisms behind this spending facilitation effect remain conjectural.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExperimental studies of dishonesty usually rely on population-level analyses, which compare the distribution of claimed rewards in an unsupervised, self-administered lottery (e.g., tossing a coin) with the expected lottery statistics (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany areas of economics use subjective data, although it had been known to present problems regarding its reliability. To improve data quality, researchers may use scoring rules that reward respondents so that it is most profitable for them to tell the truth. However, if the subjects are not well informed about the topic or if they do not pay sufficient attention, they will produce data that could not be dependably used for decision-making even though subjects gave their honest answer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFClass imbalance presents a major hurdle in the application of classification methods. A commonly taken approach is to learn ensembles of classifiers using rebalanced data. Examples include bootstrap averaging (bagging) combined with either undersampling or oversampling of the minority class examples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOnce considered provocative, the notion that the wisdom of the crowd is superior to any individual has become itself a piece of crowd wisdom, leading to speculation that online voting may soon put credentialed experts out of business. Recent applications include political and economic forecasting, evaluating nuclear safety, public policy, the quality of chemical probes, and possible responses to a restless volcano. Algorithms for extracting wisdom from the crowd are typically based on a democratic voting procedure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRecent empirical evidence shows that working in an unsupervised, isolated situation under competition, can increase dishonest behavior to achieve prestige. However, could working in a common space, in the presence of colleagues affect cheating? Here, we examine how familiar-peer influence, supervision and social incentives affect worker performance and dishonest behavior. First, we show that working in the presence of peers is an effective mechanism to constrain honest/dishonest behavior compared to an isolated work situation (experiment 1).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPersonality traits are stable predictors of many life outcomes that are associated with important decisions that involve tradeoffs over time. Therefore, a fundamental question is how tradeoffs over time vary from person to person in relation to stable personality traits. We investigated the influence of personality, as measured by the Five-Factor Model, on time preferences and on neural activity engaged by intertemporal choice.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFParkinson disease (PD) is an age-related degenerative disease of the brain, characterized by motor, cognitive, and psychiatric symptoms. Neurologists and neuroscientists now understand that several symptoms of the disease, including hallucinations and impulse control behaviors, stem from the dopaminergic medications used to control the motor aspects of PD. Converging evidence from animals and humans suggests that individual differences in the genes that affect the dopamine system influence the response of PD patients to dopaminergic medication.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCases of clear scientific misconduct have received significant media attention recently, but less flagrantly questionable research practices may be more prevalent and, ultimately, more damaging to the academic enterprise. Using an anonymous elicitation format supplemented by incentives for honest reporting, we surveyed over 2,000 psychologists about their involvement in questionable research practices. The impact of truth-telling incentives on self-admissions of questionable research practices was positive, and this impact was greater for practices that respondents judged to be less defensible.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
January 2010
Self-deception has long been the subject of speculation and controversy in psychology, evolutionary biology and philosophy. According to an influential 'deflationary' view, the concept is an over-interpretation of what is in reality an instance of motivationally biased judgement. The opposite view takes the interpersonal deception analogy seriously, and holds that some part of the self actively manipulates information so as to mislead the other part.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOver the past several decades, economists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have conducted experiments in which a subject, human or animal, repeatedly chooses between alternative actions and is rewarded based on choice history. While individual choices are unpredictable, aggregate behavior typically follows Herrnstein's matching law: the average reward per choice is equal for all chosen alternatives. In general, matching behavior does not maximize the overall reward delivered to the subject, and therefore matching appears inconsistent with the principle of utility maximization.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe "endowment effect" refers to the tendency to place greater value on items that one owns-an anomaly that violates the reference-independence assumption of rational choice theories. We investigated neural antecedents of the endowment effect in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. During scanning, 24 subjects considered six products paired with 18 different prices under buying, choosing, or selling conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicroeconomic theory maintains that purchases are driven by a combination of consumer preference and price. Using event-related fMRI, we investigated how people weigh these factors to make purchasing decisions. Consistent with neuroimaging evidence suggesting that distinct circuits anticipate gain and loss, product preference activated the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), while excessive prices activated the insula and deactivated the mesial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) prior to the purchase decision.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSubjective judgments, an essential information source for science and policy, are problematic because there are no public criteria for assessing judgmental truthfulness. I present a scoring method for eliciting truthful subjective data in situations where objective truth is unknowable. The method assigns high scores not to the most common answers but to the answers that are more common than collectively predicted, with predictions drawn from the same population.
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