The Effects Of Ego Depletion On Individuals’ Deception: The Moderating Role Of Empathy

As a common immoral behavior,deception often occurs in human social interactions and activities.From the perspective of causes,deception can be divided into two types of altruistic deception and self-interested deception.Individuals’ preferences for altruistic deception behavior and self-interested deception do not coincide in the same situation in which they have the opportunity to engage in deceptive behavior.Therefore,it is of great significance to explore the factors that affect different deceptive behaviors of individuals.Individuals use a state of self-control to resolve the conflict between their own short-term interests and moral expectations and social norms when committing deception.Combined with the perspective of Self-Control Resource Model,individuals in the ego depletion state will produce more self-interested deception,which makes ego depletion the main factor that contribute individuals producing different deception.The adverse aftereffects of ego depletion can be mitigated by means of high levels of prosocial personality traits or the induction of positive moral emotions.According to the assumption of empathy-altruism and combined with the existing research results,empathy,as both a prosocial personality trait and a positive moral emotion,can promote the individual’s altruistic motivation and alleviate the adverse aftereffects of ego depletion.Therefore,this study intends to explore the relationship between ego depletion and deception and the moderating effect of empathy through two studies.Study 1 used 2(ego depletion: high ego depletion/low ego depletion)× 2(trait empathy:cognitive empathy/emotional empathy)between-group experimental design to explore the impact of ego depletion on deception and the moderating effect of trait empathy,in which ego depletion and trait empathy was the independent variables.In this study,ego depletion was manipulated by the adapted "e" task,and the Interpersonal Relationship Pointer Scale was used to measure trait empathy,and finally the dependent variable indicators(number of altruistic deceptive behaviors and egoistic deception behaviors)were measured by the "find different" task.Based on Study 1,Study 2(ego depletion: high ego depletion/low ego depletion)×and 2(state empathy: activation empathy/control group)were used to explore the moderating effect of state empathy between ego depletion and deceptive behavior,in which ego depletion and state empathy were inter-participant variables.In this study,state empathy was activated by watching videos.From the above two studies,this study came to the following results:1.Individuals in high ego depletion tend to engage in more self-interested deception,while individuals in low ego depletion tend to engage in more altruistic ones.2.Participants in the high self-depletion group will engage in more self-interested deception and less altruistic deception than the low ego-depletion group.3.State empathy play a moderated role between ego-depletion and deception,but trait empathy doesn’t.This study came to the following conclusions: under different ego depletion,the individual’s preference for altruistic deception is not consistent with that of self-interested deception;self-depletion negatively affects individual altruistic deception,and positively affects individual self-interest deception;state empathy can mitigate the adverse effects of self-depletion on deception,but trait empathy doesn’t.