Universities are institutions dedicated to improving life through the research and dissemination of knowledge. They facilitates the "peer to peer" communication among young people; the acquisition of knowledge and skills to improve personal and community health; the propagation of healthy lifestyles through the emulation of behavior.
The present experiment examined how the interaction between senders' communicative competence, veracity and the medium through which judgments were made affected observers' accuracy. Stimuli were obtained from a previous study. Observers (N = 220) judged the truthfulness of statements provided by a good truth teller, a good liar, a bad truth teller, and a bad liar presented either via an audio-only, video-only, audio-video, or transcript format.
Research provides important evidences about the role of emotions in a wide range of judgments, including moral decisions (Haidt, 2003; Teper et al., 2015). Recent findings show that real compared to hypothetical moral decisions brings about higher physiological activity (Teper et al., 2011).
The temptation to deceive others compares to a moral dilemma: it involves a conflict between the temptation to obtain some benefit and the desire to conform to personal and social moral norms or avoid aversive social consequences. Thus, people might feel different levels of emotional and moral conflict depending on the target of the deception. Here we explored, in a morally relevant setting, how social judgements based on two fundamental dimensions of human social cognition – ‘warmth’ and ‘competence’ – impact on the decision to deceive others.
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