The intrinsic value of self-control: can resisting the temptation to cheat be rewarding in itself?
Creators: name: Caruso, Isabelle
Publisher: name: Open Science Framework
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Psychology
subject: FOS: Psychology
subject: Social and Behavioral Sciences

description: With this study, we aim to investigate whether resisting the temptation to cheat may be immediately rewarding. It is based on recent research that promotes the idea that exerting controlled behavior might not only be costly but also intrinsically rewarding in itself (Inzlicht et al., 2018). In the specific case of cheating, we hypothesize that resisting the temptation to cheat may feel immediately rewarding because people derive from their behavior what kind of a person they are (Bem, 1972; Bodner &amp; Prelec, 2003) and behaving in a way that is consistent with a positive self-concept (Dunning, 2007; Duval &amp; Wicklund, 1972). For example, it has been shown that, although giving into temptations is positively associated with momentary happiness, resisting a temptation is associated with the feeling of pride (Hofmann et al., 2013). To test whether resisting temptations is indeed associated with immediate reward, we designed an experiment where participants can cheat, but cheating is not directly observable (for review of similar tasks, see Abeler et al., 2019; Gerlach et al., 2019). In our task, participants are asked to compare two numbers with respect to an operator (either '&lt;' or '&gt;') and whenever the relationship is correct, they win points. Importantly, in one of the tasks (cheating-task) participants have to think of one number themselves, so they could in principle always say that they won. In contrast, in the other task (computer-task), the computer generates both numbers so there is an objectively correct response. We tempt participants to cheat by telling them that they will get an additional bonus depending on the number of points they win in the experiment. So whenever a participant states to have won in this task, we cannot know if this is true. Contrarily, whenever participants had the chance to cheat but didn't claim to have won, we assume that this is a true response since it would make no sense to lie about not winning. We already used this paradigm in a recent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, where we were able to show that the paradigm tempts participants to cheat and the overall number of wins in the cheating-task is above chance level (i.e., higher than 24; z = 4.45, p &lt; 0.001). After the experiment, almost 50% of participants admitted to have cheated. We also assessed emotions (general feeling, pride, guilt, and regret; see Hofmann et al., 2013) with respect to honest and dishonest trials and found, that (self-reported) honest participants reported more pride than dishonest participants (p = 0.039) and that dishonest participants' pride ratings differed significantly between honest and dishonest trials (p = 0.003). However, these emotions were only assessed as indirect and post-hoc self-report, therefore it is unclear if these ratings really reflect participants' immediate emotions after their decision to respond (dis)honestly. Therefore, we will use the same paradigm in this follow-up study using electromyography (EMG) as a direct and immediate measure of participant's affect while working on our task. It is well established that affective stimuli evoke even involuntary changes in facial muscle activity and that EMG can detect subtle muscle movements (Baker et al., 2016). Specifically, the activity of the facial muscle zygomaticus major is associated with positive affect, whereas the muscle corrugator supercilii is associated with negative affect and positive affect has an inhibitory effect on that muscle (Cacioppo et al., 1996; Larsen et al., 2003). 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