IS IT WORTH STRESSING OVER?: EXAMINING THE EFFECTS OF ACUTE STRESS ON CHEATING BEHAVIOUR AND LIE DETECTION

Abstract

With the increasing pervasiveness of stress in many facets of urban life, people often find themselves making moral decisions in stressful situations. In this paper, we investigated the effects that stress has on the engagement and identification of dishonest conduct, by examining its influence on cheating behaviour and lie detection through a series of three experimental tasks (dice rolling, problem-solving and lie detection). Results found no significant effects of stress on cheating behaviour or lie detection, and hypotheses proposing the mediation of these relationships with automatic thinking processes were also rejected. Subsidiary analyses demonstrated that individuals do engage in significantly more cheating when the deception serves group interests, but this relationship between group-serving intentions and cheating behaviour is not moderated by stress. While the ability to decode affective facial expressions was not found to mediate the relationship between stress and lie detection, this decoding ability did significantly improve the detection of lying in liars (lie detection sensitivity). Implications of these findings for future research are discussed.