Depending on who we are and which are the circumstances around us, we might find more or less easy to decide to be honest. It has been shown that sensitivity to reward and guilt proneness act as opposing forces on the decision to deceive others: the former pushes people toward dishonesty while the latter does the opposite, enhancing honest behaviour. Importantly, psychopathological conditions characterized by overly intense guilt or reward sensitivity, also show atypical moral behaviour.
A potential moderator of how the temptation vs guilt conflict relates to dishonesty, is interoception, i.e., the awareness of one¿s own bodily signals. Although it is known that interoception has a strong impact on decision making, it is still unclear whether its role could be that of detecting the magnitude of the conflict related to that decision.
With this research project we plan to record electroencephalographic activity of a group of participants that will be involved in an experimental paradigm in which they will be tempted to deceive other people to get a monetary reward. Moreover, we will assess participants¿ interoceptive abilities and basic psychopathological dimensions.
We aim to: i) to identify pre-response brain activity sensible to the temptation vs. guilt conflict in order to predict participants¿ tendency to act (dis)honestly; ii) measure participants¿ interoceptive awareness and test if it moderates the influence of the temptation vs guilt conflict on (dis)honest behavior; iii) measure the association of pre-response brain activity during the temptation vs guilt conflict and basic psychopathological dimensions.
The results from this project would have important theoretical and translational implications as it would provide information on the relation between morality, interoception and psychopathology.
This project aims at using a multidisciplinary approach (combining neuroscience, social psychology and clinical psychology) in order to provide innovative experimental evidence regarding pre-response brain activity sensitive to the temptation vs guilt conflict, at play when participants are tempted to deceive other people in order to get a monetary reward. Moreover, this project will also show if and how specific psychopathological dimensions; the ability to perceive one¿s own bodily signals (interoceptive accuracy, sensibility and awareness); and individual differences regarding moral cognition, can modulate this honesty-related conflict and its neural correlates.
Results regarding the psychopathological dimensions will be particularly relevant since they will inform on whether morality and guilt-related conflicts can be considered transdiagnostic constructs.
Parallel to this, the results regarding the relationship between moral conflicts and interoception will be very relevant for at least two reasons: first of all, although interoceptive abilities are a pretty stable, the fact that they can be improved by specific trainings (Sugawara et al., 2020), suggests the possibility that interoceptive trainings could also act as intervention for modulating morality and therefore being used for specific clinical populations. Second, these results would be very informative also regarding the process that potentially links interception to morality per se, whether for example the ability to perceive one¿s own bodily signals makes us: i) more sensitive to temptation to act (dis)honestly; ii) more sensitive to guilt feelings or iii) more sensitive to the magnitude of the conflict per se.
Finally, this project will use highly innovative data analysis algorithms that will potentially allow to predict imminent (dis)honest behavior using EEG.