Cognitive control promotes either honesty or dishonesty, depending on one’s moral default - EEG - JoN

Cognitive
control is crucially involved in making (dis)honest decisions. However, the
precise nature of this role has been hotly debated. Is honesty an intuitive response
or is willpower needed to override an intuitive inclination to cheat? A
reconciliation of these conflicting views proposes that cognitive control enables
dishonest participants to be honest, whereas it allows cheating for those who
are generally honest. Thus, cognitive control does not promote (dis)honesty per
se; it depends on one’s moral default. In the present study, we tested this
proposal using EEG in humans (males & females) in combination with an
external localizer task to mitigate the problem of reverse inference. Our
analysis revealed that the neural signature evoked by cognitive control demands
in the Stroop task can be used to estimate (dis)honest choices in an
independent cheating task, providing converging evidence that cognitive control
can indeed help honest participants to cheat, whereas it facilitates honesty
for cheaters.In this repository you can find the data and scripts used in the study. For detailed information please consult the README file.

认知控制对于形成（不）诚实的决策至关重要。然而，其确切作用机制一直备受争议。诚实是否是一种直观的反应，还是需要意志力来克服作弊的直观倾向？对这些相互冲突的观点的调和提出，认知控制使得不诚实的行为者能够表现出诚实，而对于本就诚实的人来说，它则促使他们作弊。因此，认知控制本身并不促进（不）诚实，其效果取决于个体的道德默认值。在本研究中，我们通过结合使用脑电图（EEG）对人（包括男性和女性）进行实验，并辅以外部定位任务以缓解反向推理问题，来检验这一假设。我们的分析表明，在斯特罗普任务中由认知控制需求引发的神经特征，可以用于估计独立作弊任务中的（不）诚实选择，从而为认知控制确实能够帮助诚实的行为者作弊，以及对于作弊者则促进其诚实性的假设提供了相互印证的证据。在本存储库中，您可以找到研究中使用的数据和脚本。如需详细信息，请参阅README文件。