| Popis: |
A previous study showed that darkness environment could increase cheating by creating a sense of “illusory anonymity” that let individuals expect that they would be difficult to be perceived by others (Zhong et al., 2010). We have successfully replicated the phenomena reported by Zhong et al. (2010) in an early study (https://osf.io/nkjq5). However, the perceived anonymity of participants in our results did not support the explanation by Zhong et al. (2010). According to our results, we proposed another hypothesis that the outcomes of the task in a dark environment could present a kind of “ambiguity”. It means that it was difficult for participants (and also for experimenters) to visually confirm the outcome because of the dark illumination conditions. We considered participants tended to believe that the outcome was in their favor and reported it without a closer check of the true outcome in this situation. Thus, we designed a non-visual task to ensure that participants could know the outcomes, then use the task to check participants’ cheating indicators in different illumination conditions (See more details in https://osf.io/p6j4t). In contrast to the earlier study, we found that in terms of illumination, there was no significant difference in the cheating indicators, and the effect size was considerably smaller (d = 0.1) than in the study using a visual task (https://osf.io/nkjq5, d = 0.37). To further confirm the effect of ambiguity of the task outcomes on cheating, we decided to conduct an experiment by directly manipulating this factor. |
