QoG lunch seminar with Sergejus Muravjovas

Abstract:

Studies have revealed that immersing oneself in nature can foster self-transcendent values, such as generosity trust and prosociality, while simultaneously reducing self-enhancement values and associated behaviors, such as materialism and greed. Building upon this body of research, we aimed to investigate whether nature can also reduce cheating – a self-enhancing behaviour closely tied to greed and hedonism. In two preregistered online studies (N = 1,198), we examined the impact of viewing a slideshow of beautiful nature (vs. less beautiful nature and vs. less beautiful urban imagery) on cheating, as measured by the self-reported outcome of an online coin-flip task. Such task gauges cheating because with honestly reporting the outcome, one would expect a 50/50 distribution of “heads” and “tails” in the sample. Participants were informed they would receive a monetary reward upon getting “heads” in the task. In addition to testing the effect of nature on cheating, we also explored the potential moderating role of reward responsiveness, trait awe, engagement with natural beauty and the size of the monetary reward. While finding that participants generally tended to cheat, our results did not reveal a significant main effect of viewing beautiful nature on the self-reported coin-flip outcome. In Study 1, we found that individuals who scored high on reward responsiveness and trait awe cheated less when exposed to the beautiful (vs. less beautiful) nature images. However, we were unable to replicate these findings in Study 2. These mixed results prompt further examination of our research model and the potential presence of publication bias in this area of research.