Lu Hui Jing, Chang Lei
Department of Applied Social Sciences, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Department of Educational Psychology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Evol Psychol. 2014 Jun 19;12(3):635-54. doi: 10.1177/147470491401200310.
The arms race between deception and detection is likely to have played out between individuals in different status hierarchies, with low-status individuals more likely to be deceivers and high-status individuals more likely to be detectors than the other way around. Memory and its distortion may be temporarily employed first to keep truthful information away from both self and others and later to retrieve accurate information to benefit the self. Using a dual-retrieval paradigm, we tested the hypothesis that people are likely to deceive themselves to better deceive high- rather than equal-status others. College student participants were explicitly instructed (Study 1 and 2) or induced (Study 3) to deceive either a high-status teacher or an equal-status fellow student. When interacting with the high- but not equal-status target, participants in three studies genuinely remembered fewer previously studied items than they did on a second memory test alone without the deceiving target. The results support the view that self-deception responds to status hierarchy that registers probabilities of deception detection such that people are more likely to self-deceive high- rather than equal-status others.
在不同地位等级的个体之间，欺骗与察觉之间的“军备竞赛”可能已经展开，地位低的个体比地位高的个体更有可能成为欺骗者，而地位高的个体比地位低的个体更有可能成为察觉者。记忆及其扭曲可能首先被临时用于使真实信息远离自己和他人，随后用于检索准确信息以使自己受益。我们采用双检索范式，检验了这样一个假设：人们可能会自我欺骗，以便更好地欺骗地位高而非地位相当的他人。明确指示（研究1和2）或诱导（研究3）大学生参与者欺骗一位地位高的教师或一位地位相当的同学。在与地位高而非地位相当的目标对象互动时，三项研究中的参与者在第二次单独记忆测试（没有欺骗目标对象）中真正记住的先前学习的项目，比在有欺骗目标对象时更多。结果支持了这样一种观点，即自我欺骗会对地位等级做出反应，而地位等级记录了欺骗被察觉的概率，因此人们更有可能对地位高而非地位相当的他人进行自我欺骗。
