欺騙帶來的意外快感
心理 JAN
HOFFMAN 2013年12月02日 紐時
你上一次騙人，是什麼時候的事情？
這裡說的，可不是像 伯尼·馬多夫(Bernie Madoff)、蘭斯·阿姆斯壯(Lance Armstrong)以及 約翰·愛德華茲(John Edwards)那種駭人聽聞的嚴重欺詐行為，它無傷大雅，比如在打高爾夫球時輕輕往前推一點的小小耍詐。
也許是在報銷表格上對數字四捨五入，在關鍵的考試中東張西望，又或者從朋友那裡拷貝昂貴的軟件。
那麼，在那之後你感覺如何？回想起來，當時你可能覺得緊張，還交織着一陣內疚。
但是，新的研究表明，只要你自認為小騙局沒有傷害到任何人，你的自我感覺就很可能相當良好。你所回憶起來的那種不適感實際上很可能是你內心的道德權威——那個總是督促你「應該如何如何」的聲音，對你的反應做出的改寫。
近來，心理學家和管理專家對不道德行為的研究日益增加。他們想要了解，是什麼促使人們罔顧核心價值觀？為什麼欺騙不斷增加？可以對此施加哪些干預措施？為了尋找能將人們引導向道德決策的強有力工具，大量研究人員將自己的研究重點放在了眾多成年人在欺騙他人後普遍產生的內疚感之上。
因此，華盛頓大學(University of Washington)、倫敦商學院(London Business School)、哈佛大學(Harvard)以及賓夕法尼亞大學(University of Pennsylvania)的研究人員最近發表在《人格與社會心理學雜誌》(The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)上的一項研究頗讓某些行為倫理學研究人員大跌眼鏡。該研究的標題是：「行騙者快感：不道德行為可帶來意外的情感效益。」
「人們在違背道德準則的時候會產生正面的感覺，這個發現非常新奇，」曾就行為倫理學撰寫專著，但未參與上述研究的美國南加州大學(University of Southern California)商學院助理教授斯科特·維爾特姆(Scott Wiltermuth)說。
小打小鬧的欺騙行為之所以無處不在，原因之一是「我們有太多可以匿名進行欺騙的方式，通過網絡行騙尤其如此，」維爾特姆教授說。行騙後的興奮感，則可能來源於「人們對自己的小聰明感到沾沾自喜，」他補充道。
但這些欺騙行為導致的影響卻十分真實：據估計，全球的公司每年因軟件盜版而損失的費用可高達630億美元。而美國國內稅務局（Internal Revenue Service，簡稱IRS）則報告，每年應報稅和實繳稅之間存在約3450億美元的缺口，其中一半以上是因為瞞報收入以及抵扣通貨膨脹造成。
在該研究的初期實驗中，研究人員要求參與者們預測自己在行騙後會有什麼感覺。他們普遍這樣回答說，那一定很糟。
另一組參與者在基線情緒評估後，接受了拼字測試。在測試完成後，研究人員把答案交給他們，並要求他們自己核對後匯告做對了多少題。每做對一道題，他們可獲得1美元的獎勵。
這些參與者並不知道，研究人員可以分辨出來他們是否把錯誤的答案改對了；結果，有41%的人都改了答案。
關於他們情緒的隨訪評估切實地表明，作弊者基本上都感到精神振奮，而誠實的參與者則並非如此。
「人們在作弊後會更加快樂這個事實多少令人不安，因為這種情緒會對欺騙行為造成強化效果——這就意味着此後人們將更容易故伎重演，」該研究的主要作者、華盛頓大學領導力和戰略思想研究中心(Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking)的博士後研究助理妮科爾·E·魯迪(Nicole E. Ruedy)表示。
然後，她和同事們撤消了經濟獎勵，並讓新一組參與者在計算機上接受測試，還告訴他們，測試的結果與他們的智力和未來成功的可能性有關。
但是，研究人員告知77名參與者，如果他們看到為他們提供正確答案的彈出信息，應忽略它並繼續測試。
在這組參與者中，有約68%的人至少作弊了一次——點擊按鈕偷看正確答案。同樣，在隨訪評估中，該組也報告樂觀情緒有所上升。
為什麼人們對作弊會感到不亦樂乎？因為沒有被抓個現行逃過了一劫？如果是這樣，那麼他們在作弊時應該會困擾不已壓力重重。又或者，他們是自欺欺人地將欺騙合理化最小化，從而讓自己心理可以好過一點？
在排除了這些可能性之後，研究人員發現，騙子們往往感到興奮、自我滿足且充滿優越感。
即使受試者們只是間接作弊，這種效應仍然存在。在接下來的實驗中，受試者們與假扮的參與者一起做數學題。假參與者稱自己知道答案，並提出以此作弊來提高兩人的成績。但真正的參與者無一反對。而且隨訪表明，他們並沒有因此而感到有什麼不妥。
「我們都有些震驚，」魯迪博士說。
研究人員還沒有測定過這些「快感」是否只是短暫存在。然而，欺騙可觸發類似成癮的欣快感這一點表明，要改變欺騙行為相當困難，在傳統的負罪感看起來並沒有什麼效果的情況下尤其如此。
一種可能的解決方式是去除潛在的騙子們身上「匿名」這個保護傘。
去年發表在《美國科學院院刊》(The Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences)上的一項研究審查了經常出現欺詐的文檔，如納稅申報表格和汽車保單等。一般來說，人們會先填寫個人信息（無論是否如實），只在最後簽個名來證明以上屬實。但是，研究人員向某一汽車保險公司的客戶發放了審計表格上，要求他們在最上一欄簽名，就像出庭作證時宣誓一樣。使用這種表格後，雖然人們明知較高的行駛里程通常會導致保費提升，可報告里程還是增加了10.25%。
維爾特姆教授提出，對付日常騙術伎倆的另一種方法是削弱騙子們的自我滿足感。他建議，公司可以發送「連猴子都可以玩轉我們的系統」這類消息來打破欺詐和聰明之間的等號，並強調員工誠信的價值。
魯迪博士指出，該研究中的作弊者都相信自己的行為並沒有傷害任何人。「如果可以指出欺騙行為的受害者，讓『騙子們』認識到他們的行為實際上讓他人付出了怎樣的代價，也許就可以制止這種行為，」她說。
When was the last time you cheated?
Not on the soul-scorching magnitude of,
say, Bernie Madoff, Lance Armstrong or John Edwards. Just nudge-the-golf-ball
cheating.
Maybe you rounded up numbers on an expense
report. Let your eyes wander during a high-stakes exam. Or copied a friend’s
expensive software.
And how did you feel afterward? You may
recall nervousness, a twinge of guilt.
But new research shows that as long as you
didn’t think your cheating hurt anyone, you may have felt great. The discomfort
you remember feeling then may actually be a response rewritten now by your
inner moral authority, your “should” voice.
Unethical behavior is increasingly studied
by psychologists and management specialists. They want to understand what
prompts people to abrogate core values, why cheating appears to be on the rise,
and what interventions can be made. To find a powerful tool to turn people
toward ethical decisions, many researchers have focused on the guilt that many
adults feel after cheating.
So some behavioral ethics researchers were
startled by a study published recently in The Journal of Personality and
Social Psychology by researchers at the University of Washington, the
London Business School, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. The title:
“The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior.”
“Showing people feeling positively after
committing a moral transgression is pretty novel,” said Scott
Wiltermuth, an assistant professor in the business school at the University
of Southern California, who writes about behavioral ethics and was not involved
in this study.
One reason for pervasive garden-variety
cheating is “that we have so many ways to cheat anonymously, especially via the
Web,” Professor Wiltermuth said. The exhilaration, he added, may come from
“people congratulating themselves on their cleverness.”
The impact is real: According to some
estimates, software piracy costs companies $63 billion a year globally. The I.R.S. has reported an
annual gap between actual and reported taxes of about $345 billion, more than
half of that because incomes are underreported and deductions inflated.
In the study’s initial experiments,
participants were asked to predict how they would feel if they cheated. Badly,
they generally reported.
Another set of participants was given a
baseline assessment of their moods. Then they took a word-unscrambling test.
After finishing, they were handed an answer key, told to check their answers
and asked to report the number of correct ones. For every right answer, they
would earn $1.
Participants did not know that researchers
could tell if they corrected wrong answers; 41 percent did so.
The follow-up assessment of their moods
indeed showed that the cheaters, on average, felt an emotional boost that the
honest participants didn’t.
“The fact that people feel happier after
cheating is disturbing, because there is emotional reinforcement of the behavior,
meaning they could be more likely to do it again,” said Nicole E. Ruedy, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral
research associate at the University of Washington’s Center for Leadership and
Strategic Thinking.
Then she and her colleagues removed the
financial incentive. A new group would take a test on a computer. The results,
they were told, would correlate with intelligence and a likelihood of future
success.
But 77 participants were told that if they
saw a pop-up message offering them the correct answer, they should ignore it
and continue working.
About 68 percent of this group cheated at
least once, clicking the button for the correct answer. In the follow-up
assessment, this group also reported a rise in upbeat feelings.
Why did people feel so good about cheating?
Was it relief at not being caught? That would imply that while cheating, they
felt stress or distress. Or had they deceived themselves, rationalizing or
minimizing the cheating to feel better?
Stripping away these possibilities, the
researchers found that those who cheated experienced thrill, self-satisfaction,
a sense of superiority.
The effect persisted even when subjects
cheated indirectly. Next, they would solve math problems with someone who was
just pretending to be a participant. The fake participant reported the results,
elevating the scores, thus cheating for both. But no actual participant
objected. And again, they felt just fine about it.
“We were a little appalled,” Dr. Ruedy
said.
The researchers did not measure whether the
“high” was short-lived. Nonetheless, the elated, addictive feelings triggered
by cheating point to the difficulty in changing behavior, since old-fashioned
guilt tripping seems ineffective.
One way may be to remove the potential
cheater’s cloak of anonymity.
A study
last year in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at
documents on which cheating often occurs, like tax forms and car insurance
policies. Typically, individuals fill out information first, creatively or
honestly, only attesting to accuracy with a signature at the end. But
researchers sent an audit form to customers of an auto insurer, asking for
their signatures at the top, like a swearing-in before court testimony. This
form resulted in a 10.25 percent bump in the mileage reported, even though
higher mileage usually translates into higher premiums.
Another solution to everyday subterfuge,
suggested Professor Wiltermuth, would be to undercut the cheater’s
self-satisfaction. Companies could send a message that “a monkey could game our
system,” undercutting cheating as clever and emphasizing how much employee
integrity is valued, he said.
Dr. Ruedy noted that the study’s cheaters
believed that no one was hurt by their actions. “Perhaps people could be made
aware of the costs that others actually bear,” she said. “Identify victims of
their behavior.”
發表文章
沒有留言:
張貼留言