Dual-promotion: Bragging better by promoting peers.

To create favorable impressions and receive credit, individuals need to share information about their past accomplishments. Broadcasting one's past accomplishments or claiming credit to demonstrate competence, however, can harm perceptions of warmth and likability. In fact, prior work has conceptualized self-promotion as a hydraulic challenge: tactics that boost perceptions along one dimension (e.g., competence) harm perceptions along other dimensions (e.g., warmth). In this work, we identify a novel approach to self-promotion: We show that by combining self-promotion with other-promotion (complimenting or giving credit to others), which we term "dual-promotion," individuals can project both warmth and competence to make better impressions on observers than they do by only self-promoting. In seven preregistered studies, including analyses of annual reports from members of Congress and experiments using social network, workplace, and political contexts (total N = 1,448), we show that individuals who engage in dual-promotion create more favorable impressions of warmth and competence than those who only engage in self-promotion. The beneficial effects of dual-promotion are robust to both competitive and noncompetitive contexts and extend to behavioral intentions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Competition and moral behavior: A meta-analysis of forty-five crowd-sourced experimental designs.

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity-variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity-estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs-indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.

Questions and deception: How to ask better questions and elicit the truth.

Questions are important tools for uncovering information, but to avoid deception, question askers must be strategic in what and how they ask-and consider the social implications of their questions. Askers should consider that in addition to soliciting information, questions also signal information about expected answers, askers' own knowledge, and the parties' relationship. We review literature on deception, conversations, and impression management to discuss signals embedded in question phrasing, and how these signals affect the truthfulness of respondents' disclosures. Askers can increase truthful disclosure by remaining neutral about the desirability of possible responses, conveying knowledge of the topic, and signaling trust. We identify how asking better questions requires being more cognizant of the informational and relational signals that questions send.

When Unequals Compete: Where Do They Stand After the Competition?

When two unequals compete, the stronger, more able, richer competitor commonly stands a better chance of winning. If the stronger competitor does win, this worsens the relative status of the weaker competitor even further. Does this result depend on the type of competition? Does it depend on the size of the reward to be won? In the present paper, we report an experimental study of how a very simple competitive mechanism can affect the relative standing of the weaker, poorer of two competitors. In a lab experiment with 208 participants, we employed competitions with different levels of uncertainty in how a winner was determined and with different sizes of rewards to be won, to explore effects on the relative standing of the weaker and stronger competitors. We used an investment game in which participants differing in their endowed budgets competed against one another, forfeiting their investment whether they won or lost. Two versions of the game were used: a simple all-pay-auction contest and a non-constant-sum Colonel Blotto contest (Roberson & Kvasov, 2012), both with players that were unequal in their budgets. Results revealed that, in line with published game-theoretic solutions, the relative standing of the weaker agents worsened following competition, and increasingly so the higher the rewards. At the same time, the effect was mitigated in the variant of the Colonel Blotto game, which involved more uncertainty in how the winner was determined.

To Cheat or Not To Cheat: Tryptophan Hydroxylase 2 SNP Variants Contribute to Dishonest Behavior.

Although, lying (bear false witness) is explicitly prohibited in the Decalogue and a focus of interest in philosophy and theology, more recently the behavioral and neural mechanisms of deception are gaining increasing attention from diverse fields especially economics, psychology, and neuroscience. Despite the considerable role of heredity in explaining individual differences in deceptive behavior, few studies have investigated which specific genes contribute to the heterogeneity of lying behavior across individuals. Also, little is known concerning which specific neurotransmitter pathways underlie deception. Toward addressing these two key questions, we implemented a neurogenetic strategy and modeled deception by an incentivized die-under-cup task in a laboratory setting. The results of this exploratory study provide provisional evidence that SNP variants across the tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (TPH2) gene, that encodes the rate-limiting enzyme in the biosynthesis of brain serotonin, contribute to individual differences in deceptive behavior.