Tal Eyal

We explore and demonstrate the anticipated and actual emotions that are experienced by individuals who engage in dishonest behaviors that benefit others (altruistic dishonesty) versus the self (egoistic dishonesty), and primarily focus on the positive emotion of pride. Across three preregistered experiments (one scenario experiment and two incentivized behavioral ones), we found that engaging in altruistic dishonesty was not only more prevalent than egoistic dishonesty but also evoked more pride and less guilt and shame. Interestingly, the increase in pride and decrease in guilt and shame when cheating solely for the benefit of others were attenuated when participants cheated for the benefit of both others and themselves. These findings shed further light on the emotional processes involved in dishonesty and highlight the understudied role of pride. The positive association between engaging in altruistic dishonesty and pride may explain the relatively high rates of altruistic dishonesty observed in the current and previous studies, as it suggests that having an altruistic justification may not only enable cheaters to maintain a clear conscience but also even boost how they feel about themselves.

The world abounds with different perspectives, which necessitates balancing between maintaining the currently relevant perspective and flexibly switching between perspectives, if needed. Employing the distinction between reactive and proactive control (Braver, 2012), we argue that previous research on perspective-taking has mainly looked at the cost of activating reactive control to deal with what is happening now. Here we examine the cost of activating proactive control in order to be prepared for what might happen in the future. In three experiments, we embed a perspective-taking task (Samson et al., 2010) into a task-switching design and calculate perspective-mixing costs to capture proactive control. We show that a context in which perspective shifts might occur unpredictably (compared to a context in which such shifts are not expected) results in a poorer ability to maintain any perspective, but especially one's own. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous research has distinguished between core disgust, elicited by revolting physical objects like spoiled food, and sociomoral disgust, elicited by violations of social norms or moral principles. We suggest that different levels of construal are involved in the elicitation of core disgust and moral disgust. Specifically, we predicted that the elicitation of core disgust involves more concrete than abstract construal, while the elicitation of moral disgust involves more abstract than concrete construal. On that basis, we examined whether changing the level at which the eliciting situation is construed has a different effect on the intensity of core disgust and moral disgust. In Experiment 1, we found that core disgust is associated more with concreteness than abstractness, whereas moral disgust is associated more with abstractness than concreteness. Next, we found that scenarios (Experiment 2) and images (Experiment 3) that elicit core disgust are construed more concretely and less abstractly, while scenarios and images that elicit moral disgust are construed more abstractly and less concretely. In the 2 final experiments we manipulated construal level and found that the elicitation of core disgust depends on concrete construal more than the elicitation of moral disgust (Experiment 4), while the elicitation of moral disgust depends on abstract construal more than the elicitation of core disgust (Experiment 5). These findings suggest that because core disgust and moral disgust differ in the construal level of their elicitors, changing the level at which the eliciting object is construed differently affects the intensity of core disgust and moral disgust. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).