Schedule of Events | Symposia

Behavioral correlates of honesty and deception

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Andrew Kayser^1,2,3, Julia Bertolero^1,2, Sangil Lee², Jan Peters⁴, Ming Hsu²; ¹UC San Francisco, ²UC Berkeley, ³San Francisco VA Health Care System, ⁴University of Cologne

Deception is a universal social behavior. Past work to explore the cognitive basis of deception has used various paradigms to understand both individual variation in deceptive tendencies and the dependence on factors such as reward magnitude. However, understanding deception also requires determining how it varies with characteristics of the deceiver and the deceived. Using an online sample (N=808), we investigate the hypotheses that the frequency of deception decreases with perceived warmth, and increases with perceived competence, of the partner, and the magnitudes of these dependencies decline with altered social function. Here we use an incentivized signaling game in which participants act as the signaler to different assigned partners identified only by professions, such as “pediatrician”. Besides the “deception” condition, in which participants are given the opportunity to lie to their partners, we also include a “preference” condition, where they simply express their preference without the ability to lie. As predicted, deceptive behavior occurs less often than selfish behavior, and the tendency for both deception and selfishness decreases with perceived warmth, and increases with perceived competence, of the partner. Additionally, using the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test (AUDIT-C) to divide signalers into low- and high-risk groups for alcohol misuse, we find a significant interaction between warmth and AUDIT-C score, such that decisions by the high-risk group are less sensitive to warmth despite mean ratings suggesting they view the recipients as warmer. Together these results link deception to individual-level characteristics, and they demonstrate that higher AUDIT-C scores correlate with altered social decision-making.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Other