When was the last time you cheated?  
The definition of cheating is “an immoral way of achieving a goal“.

Certainly not something to be proud of or feel good about, cheating is usually associated with feelings of guilt and nervousness.

Interestingly, the NY Times reports recent research that shows as long as you didn’t think your cheating hurt anyone, you may have felt great afterwards.

The study entitled “The Cheater’s High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior” was recently published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by researchers Ruedy, et al from the University of Washington, the London Business School, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

In the study’s initial experiments, one group of participants were asked to predict how they would feel if they cheated. In general, most people claimed they would feel bad.

Another set of participants were given a baseline assessment of their moods, took a word-unscrambling test and were then handed an answer key. They were told to check their answers and asked to report how many they got correct. For every correct answer, they were told they would be paid $1 dollar. 41% of the participants cheated and a follow-up assessment of their moods showed that they felt an emotional boost compared to those who did not cheat.

“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.

Ruedy and her team them removed the financial incentive and asked a new group to take a test on a computer. The participants were told the results would correlate with intelligence and a likelihood of future success. 77 participants were told that if they saw a pop-up message offering them the correct answer, they should ignore it and continue working.

In this study, more people cheated. In fact, 68% 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. So the financial incentive did not provide additional incentive to cheat- participants did it anyway.

Why did these participants cheat? The researchers found that those who cheated experienced thrill, self-satisfaction, a sense of superiority.

Dr. Ruedy noted that the study’s cheats 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.”

For the complete research paper and to learn more, please click on this link

Courtesy of Stockvault

What makes the human face so interesting?  Newborn babies will stare at the faces of the people around them and when you find someone attractive, you may find yourself starting at their face for long periods of time.

Why is it so compelling to covet the human face?

Psychology Today has taken this question to film and asked why our gaze seems to linger longer on images that have faces more than any other images. The article noted that in a study by Robert Fantz, young infants stared twice as long at a black-and-white simplified human face than black-and-white concentric circles. Even though a bull’s-eye target is eye-catching, babies spent twice as much time gazing at a simplified face.

The article notes that the ‘ability to orient to, and accurately read, human faces has high survival value throughout our lives. We must register quickly if there is a stranger in our midst, and sense if this is a friendly or threatening presence.  In short, we may be hard-wired to focus on faces as they provide information that is fundamentally important to our physical and social survival.’

The article directly comments that our face interest is particularly apparent in movies. An interesting insight, commented on by Hungarian film theorist Béla Balázs, is that film stands out from other performance arts in that film has the coveted “close-ups” and can bring its audience closer to the emotion of a scene via the facial expressions of the actor.

Many individuals have difficulty interpreting emotion on a large or abstract scale; images of a tornado victim or the agony of a loss can be expressed more clearly for the audience via the face.

Wide shots usually reveal a broader context while facial shots embody the emotional character of the film.  Also close-ups give the opportunity to have the audience mirror the emotions they see, creating a more intimate relationship with the character in the film and heightening the experience as a whole.

The article goes on to state, “The lingering close-up of a face presents only the illusion of being able to read the inner thoughts of another. What we think a film character may be thinking may reveal as much, if not more, about the inner recesses of our own minds.“