Effect Of Ego Depletion On Dishonest Behavior Under Reward Conditions

The crisis of credit in today’s society is emerging,while students have also been poisoned by the atmosphere of dishonesty.From the perspective of psychology,the behavior of breaking faith is caused by internal and external factors.The internal reasons include students’ specific personality traits,their own level of integrity,the degree of self-control resource depletion,sense of responsibility,moral cognition and moral emotion.External causes mainly refer to school,family,society and other aspects of the influence.As can be seen from previous studies,dishonesty was one of the after-effects of ego-depletion.Due to the decrease of self-control resources,they are more likely to break promises.Research shows that when individuals’ psychological resources are consumed,they are more likely to be motivated to act selfishly.This suggests that ego-depletion does not reduce resources or capacity for self-control,but rather reduces irrational persistence.Ego-depletion comes into play because of shifts in strategy,such as motivation and attention.Based on the deficiencies of previous studies,the study takes the Process Model of Ego-depletion as the theoretical base.In this study,the relationship between ego depletion and dishonest behavior was deeply discussed through questionnaires and experiments.Through the ego-depletion process model,this paper attempts to probe into the internal mechanism of ego-depletion’s influencing on individual dishonesty behavior from the perspective of motivation transformation.In this study,a questionnaire survey was conducted among 406 college students using self-control scale,self-regulation fatigue scale and integrity scale.It has attempted to examine the moderating effects of self-control on self-regulation fatigue(chronic self-control resource depletion)and integrity.The results showed that :(1)there was a negative positive correlation between self-regulation fatigue and individual integrity level;(2)self-control plays a regulating role in the influence of self-regulation fatigue on integrity.Study 2 used 2(ego depletion: high vs.low)×2(incentive: money vs.convenience)as experimental design between subjects.The dependent variable is the behavior of dishonesty,and the total accuracy and response time of each subject were taken as indicators.Study 2adopted habit change paradigm as the operational task of ego-depletion.In this way,exploring the influence mechanism of ego-depletion degree on individual dishonesty behavior under different task situations.The results showed that the accuracy of the high-depletion group was significantly different from that of the low-depletion group in the guessing task,but not in the calculation task.In study 3,2(ego depletion: high vs.low)×2(reward accessibility: reward accessibility vs.reward rarity)was also used to design the experiment between subjects with two factors.The dependent variable was the dishonest behavior in the psychological test,and the statistical index was the degree of false report.The habit change paradigm was adopted as the operation task of ego depletion condition to explore the influence mechanism of reward accessibility and ego depletion degree on individual dishonesty behavior.The results suggest that people in a state of high ego depletion are more likely to break promises when material rewards are readily available.Compared with individuals in a low ego-depletion state,the performance is better than that of those in a low ego-depletion state.Under the condition that material rewards are rare,there is no such difference.In summary,this study found that: Firstly,the level of ego-depletion is an effective trust cue.Individuals with high ego loss are more prone to dishonest behaviors,and their self-control ability is a moderating variable.Secondly,according to PMED,ego depletion leads to an increase in dishonest behavior because it shifts self-control toward self-gratification.Individuals in a high ego-depletion state are more likely to break promises in a material-reward situation.Similarly,individuals in high ego depletion were more likely to engage in dishonest behavior when rewards were readily available.While there was no such difference when rewards were scarce.Thirdly,the results support the PMED view.Ego-depletion is due to a shift in strategy.The effort stops when one realizes that the cost of the effort is greater than the reward of the task.