Abstract:

Deceit judgment and deceit behavior have different psychological mechanisms. Understanding the relationship between them will enhance mutual trust and long-term interests of the team. Self-control refers to the ability of restraining unnecessary automatic behavior inclination to maintain or promote cooperation. Self-control is believed as the supervision mechanism of the internal natural impulse and the external cultural requirements. Self-control is an important motivation clue in the deceit recognition. However, the self-control plays the motivation clue role in the deceit recognition or the supervision mechanism role in implementing deceits, the cognition mechanism remains unclear yet. The influences of the self-control ability and self-control resources on the deceits are different, but the cognition mechanism of the impacts hasn’t been revealed yet. In the present study, we adopted behavioral experiments to investigate the influence of self-control on deception from two views. In experiment 1, we used the material priming method to examine the impact of perceived others’ self-control ability on deceit judgment. The results showed that compared with the ones who have high self-control ability, subjects tended to think the ones who have low self-control ability were inclined to have deception behavior and inclination for their own interest. In experiment 2, we used the video priming method to investigate the impact of perceived others’ self-control resource exhaustion on deception judgment. And the results showed that when perceiving others’ self-control resource exhausted, there were no significant main effects or interaction effect in deception inclination when evaluating others deceived for his own interests and other’s interest, or in some given contexts. In experiment 3, we adopted the visual perception task to examine the influence of different levels of self-control ability on deceit behavior. The results showed that compared with the high self-control resource group, the low self-control resource group had more deception behavior and inclination. In experiment 4, we adopted the Stroop color task and the visual perception task to examine self-control resource’s impact on deception behavior. The results showed that compared with the control group, the self-control resource exhaustion group had more deception behavior and inclination. These findings showed that when judging deception, people preferentially utilize others’ self-control ability level to judge whether they have deception motivation or inclination. When implementing deception behavior, individuals who have high self-control ability can better restrain selfish motivation and consider long term interests. The individuals who have sufficient self-control resource are inclined to withstand the temptation.

Key words: self-control ability, self-control resource, self-control failure, deception