Acting Dishonestly Impairs Our Ability To Read Other People’s Emotions

By guest blogger Rhi Willmot

Can a lie still be harmful if it’s never found out? New research on the relationship between dishonesty and social understanding may unsettle the fibbers amongst us. In a multi-study investigation with a total of 2,588 participants, scientists have found Pinocchio isn’t the only one to experience a few personal problems after telling lies.



In the recent paper, published by the Journal of Experimental Psychology, Julia Lee from the University of Michigan and colleagues examined whether acts of dishonesty impair our “empathic accuracy,” the ability to detect the emotions of others. Behaving untruthfully, the authors theorised, may cause us to withdraw from other people, and in turn make social interaction more difficult. If this is the case, dishonesty could have significant implications for how we maintain relationships, resolve conflict, and collaborate at work.

In an initial pair of studies, the researchers asked 259 adults how often they committed dishonest acts in the workplace, and gave another group of 150 individuals the opportunity to cheat on a computer game. All participants then completed the “Reading the Eyes in the Mind” task, to measure their empathic accuracy. This involved viewing video clips of the region surrounding actors’ eyes, and selecting one of four possible emotions to best describe the actor’s mental state. In both studies, greater dishonesty was associated with a greater number of inaccurate selections.

But correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation. So to find out whether dishonesty actively reduces empathic accuracy, the research team then offered a sample of university students the chance to win real money in a die-throwing game. Participants were asked to predict which side of the die would show a higher number, with correct guesses exchangeable for more cash. However, while control participants gave their predictions at the start of the game, a second group did so once the die had been rolled — offering them the chance to cheat.

Compared to control participants, the second group, or “likely-cheating condition”, reported more correct guesses, suggesting they capitalised on the opportunity for deceit. They also performed worse on the Reading the Eyes in the Mind task, indicating that this dishonesty made it more difficult for them to read others’ emotions. In a subsequent game, where participants could earn $2 for sending an untruthful message to an anonymous partner or $0.50 for telling the truth, those in the likely-cheating condition were also more likely to lie, which suggests their original dishonesty prompted a further unscrupulous act.

Why might dishonesty impair our emotion-reading powers? One explanation is that it reduces our “relational self-construal” — the extent to which we think of ourselves in terms of social connections (e.g. “I am a sister”). Such social distancing could help us to justify immoral acts, because it reduces the degree of attention and concern we devote to others — a literal form of avoiding “looking someone in the eye”. Indeed, a fifth experiment using the same die-throwing and empathic accuracy tasks demonstrated that “likely-cheaters” described themselves using fewer social phrases than the control group, which accounted for the relationship between dishonesty and emotional-reading.

It also seems some people may be more susceptible to these effects than others. In a final experiment, Lee and colleagues looked at “vagal reactivity”— a measure of heart rate associated with self-regulation and social sensitivity. Those with high vagal reactivity didn’t display reduced empathic accuracy after lying, whilst those with low reactivity did experience the impairing effect. The authors suggest that people who are more socially sensitive to begin with are still able to read the emotions of others even after dishonest behaviour, while those with less reactivity, and therefore less social sensitivity, are more vulnerable to the damaging effects of dishonesty.

It remains unclear how long the effects of dishonesty on empathic accuracy last, and it would also be interesting to explore whether dishonesty makes it harder to detect emotion when we can’t see other people, but can hear their voice, or see words they write online. This might shed light on dishonest actions which touch many of us, such as the spreading of fake news.

Regardless of whether dishonesty is detected by others, the evidence is clear. Cheating can have significant personal costs by reducing our general understanding of the feelings of others, and these are particularly severe for those who already find interpersonal interaction more difficult. So, socially-insensitive con artists – beware!

SOURCE:

https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/09/26/acting-dishonestly-impairs-our-ability-to-read-other-peoples-emotions/#more-37949(accessed 27.9.19)

Most People Don’t Know This Is The Best Way To Empathise

People are mistaken about the best way to understand other people’s minds.


The best way to know other people’s minds is to put yourself in their shoes, new research suggests.


This is not what people expect, though.

Instead, people assume that reading facial expressions and body language is a better way of understanding the emotional states of others.

Study authors, Drs Haotian Zhou and Nicholas Epley said:


“People expected that they could infer another’s emotions by watching him or her, when in fact they were more accurate when they were actually in the same situation as the other person.

And this bias persisted even after our participants gained firsthand experience with both strategies.”

The results come from a study which tested different ways of reading emotional states.

Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes provided greater emotional insight than trying to read facial expressions.


Strangely, people do not appreciate the benefits of putting themselves in someone else’s shoes.


They thought that reading facial expressions and body language would be better.

The experimenters gave people in the study hints about the best way to understand emotions, but still, they persisted with trying to read body language.

In one re-run, people attempted to read their own facial expressions from a month earlier in preference to empathising.

Zhou and Epley said:


“Our most surprising finding was that people committed the same mistakes when trying to understand themselves.

They dramatically overestimated how much their own face would reveal, and underestimated the accuracy they would glean from being in their own past shoes again.”

The study’s authors conclude:


“Only by understanding why our inferences about each other sometimes go astray can we learn how to understand each other better.”

SOURCE:

http://www.spring.org.uk/2017/03/best-way-empathise.php(accessed 7.3.17)

The study was published in the journal Psychological Science(Zhou et al., 2017).

Learning from Psychopaths

It’s too simplistic to think of psychopaths as being murderers or law-breakers, says Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton.

In his new book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths, Dutton examines what we can learn from those who lack conscience but are also bold and highly resilient to stress.

What exactly is a psychopath?

No sooner is the word out of someone’s mouth  than images of [serial killers] like Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer come to mind. It doesn’t automatically mean that you’re a criminal or serial killer.  When psychologists talk about psychopaths, what we refer to are people with a distinct set of personality characteristics including ruthlessness,  fearlessness, mental toughness, a charismatic personality and lack of conscience and empathy.

You write that you think your father was a psychopath…

It sounds like a crazy thing to say, but there’s no doubt at all about it. He was a nailed down psychopath.  He wasn’t violent. He was a market trader [in the U.K., a person who sells things at an open-air street market].  One of the central messages of the book is that you don’t need to be violent to be a psychopath.  My dad was ruthless, fearless and also extremely charming. He could have sold shaving cream to the Taliban.

So what would be an example of his psychopathic behavior?

When I was a kid, probably about 9 or 10 [years old], we went to an Indian restaurant for dinner. Just as my dad was about to pay, he suddenly tinked his spoon against his glass and stood up. The whole restaurant went silent. My dad said, “I’d just like to thank you all for coming; some from just round the corner, some from much further afield. You’re all most welcome to join us for a little drinks reception across the road.’

And so an entire restaurant of strangers who had never seen us before were  all applauding wildly because they didn’t want to be seen as gatecrashers. We just took off. He [told me] we’re not going to the pub really and [explained that his] old friend Malcolm had [just opened a new pub across the street].

If you think about the front you need to do that: it’s a whole different kind of personality.  On a personal level, I guess I wrote the book to figure out my old man.

Were you afraid you might have gotten some of those genes?

I have some psychopathic characteristics.  I’m not so ruthless. I’m pretty fearless. Not much phases me. I’ve got mental toughness; people say I’m quite persistent.  But what lets me down in the psychopath stakes is that I do have a heck of a conscience and am rather empathetic. I’m high on some characteristics and low on others.

Psychopaths don’t have the caring part of empathy, but they are better than average at the “mind reading” part where they can predict other people’s behavior in order to manipulate it.

It’s a real paradox. Some years ago, I interviewed a psychopath — and I can’t work out for the life of me whether he being manipulative or telling the truth — it was probably a bit of both, but he said, ‘If you had a deaf guy standing watching a building burn down and had a child in the building screaming in pain and the deaf guy didn’t go in, you wouldn’t hold him to blame. Imagine if you’re emotionally deaf. You can hear the sound, but it doesn’t do anything for you. You don’t feel that emotional kick in the backside to go in and do something.’

That means psychopaths must miss out on some of life’s greatest pleasures, too.  If the happiest moments of our lives tend to involve sharing joy with others—falling in love, having fun with people we care about— they don’t have any of that.

In a sense, they never had that so they’re not going to miss it. We think, because we have empathy, ‘Gosh how terrible it must be to not have it.’ But  if you never had it to start with, you don’t miss it.  I agree as an empathetic  person, I find it horrendous to imagine [living a life] where you couldn’t take pleasure from others and didn’t feel love and compassion.

What do you think makes one psychopath a serial killer while the other winds up on Wall Street?

Let’s say you are a psychopath and you get a poor start in life.  You’re low in intelligence and also dispositionally violent. Just due to natural biology, some people are more aggressive than others from the word go. Your prospects, to be perfectly honest, are not great. You’re going to end up as a low level thug or enforcer in a criminal gang and either way, you will wind up in prison.

Now, remove violence from the equation. You are a psychopath who is nonviolent but you don’t get a good start. Your prospects are a little better, you end up as a small time con artist or drug dealer. You’re also going to wind up in prison very quickly.

Then [consider] a psychopath who is not dispositionally violent. You get a good start in life and are intelligent.  Now, it’s a different story. Now, you’re more likely to kill in the market than anywhere else.  If you’re an intelligent psychopath and violent [and get a good start], there are any number of exciting occupations, anything from special forces operative to head of a criminal syndicate.

What other factors are important?

One difference tends to emerge between functional and criminal psychopaths.  The successful functioning ones are able to delay gratification a bit more. They are less impulsive than the criminal ones. Recently, a study looked at the difference between criminal psychopaths in a maximum security prison and business executives.

There was a range of psychopathic traits that were more common among business executives. The charming personality, fearlessness and lack of empathy and conscience were more common in executives. The difference was when it came to more overtly antisocial behavior. Here, the criminals were higher— on criminal behavior and physical aggression and lower on discipline and self control.

What makes the difference between functioning successfully [or not] isn’t just the level of traits, it’s how they interact with [tendencies towards] violence and intelligence and also with other characteristics like sexual stuff that may be going on. You may get a kick out of inflicting pain on women if you’ve been humiliated by a woman early on.  There’s a myriad of different triggers that can tip the balance one way or another.

Child abuse must surely be one of them…

Here we come onto how genes and environment interact. There’s a very famous case involving a guy called Bradley Waldroup in Utah. He committed a terrible murder in which he shot and beat to death one of his wife’s best friends whom he suspected of having an affair with her.

[At that time, researchers] had uncovered what the media described as a ‘warrior gene.’ If you got the short version of the gene you are very likely to become a violent criminal or killer— but only if you are abused as a child. That’s the trigger that sets off that gene. If you get the long version of the gene and are abused or have a violent childhood, you will not stand that much risk of become violent criminal

When Waldroup was brought to trial, his defense attorney got on [an expert on] the stand and asked whether [the defendant] had the short variant, the warrior gene and it turned out that he did. The next question was, ‘Was he abused as a child?’ and the answer was yes, he was.

Basically, the attorney made the case that could we not argue that Waldroup’s free will was in some way compromised?  Maybe, if our behavior is a byproduct of the interplay between genetics and the environment and we are not free to choose either, to what extent are we free to choose at all?

Bradley Waldrop’s sentence was commuted from death to life in prison. My feeling is that this is the start of a raft of similar cases.

MORE: My Brain Made Me Do It: Psychopaths and Free Will

But should psychopaths get longer or shorter sentences when we aren’t talking about death vs. life in prison?  You could argue they should be in prison longer because they are clearly dangerous— or you could make the reverse argument for shorter sentences because it’s not really their fault?

If they are wired differently, then maybe we should rethink it: it’s not their fault that they are wired like that. But we cannot allow people to murder and rape so there is an argument for locking them up for longer.

Would you agree that without psychopathic traits, we might lose a lot of leaders and heroes?

There’s always been a need for risk-takers in society and a need for ruthlessness, charm, charisma and a need for mental toughness and emotional detachment.

All of these traits are on a spectrum, just as there exists no official division  between someone who plays the piano well and a concert pianist. One individual might be ruthless and fearless, but not have a lack of conscience.

If you’ve got loads of these traits all turned up to max, you’re going to overload the circuits [and be a dangerous psychopath].

But you wouldn’t be anywhere near dangerous if some were high and some low. Depending on context, you’re talking different proportions that might be quite functionally adapted to whatever professional field of endeavor you might be working in. [At extremely high levels], you might have problems but if turn those down, you might find people who are better than normal in certain aspects.

SOURCE:

Interview with the Psychologist Kevin Dutton

Magazine: TIME: Health and Family 

http://healthland.time.com/2012/11/19/learning-from-psychopaths-qa-with-psychologist-kevin-dutton/