Ideological priming-mediated effects over politically non-aligned people’s’ deceptive behaviour: An eye tracking study

The growing scandals and episodes of corruption involving politics have led to an increase of political abstentionism among voters and to the diffusion of protest movements. Thus, understanding whether and to what extent political ideology still plays a role in people’s decision making and behaviour is crucial. By combining an ideological priming procedure with the ‘Temptation to Lie Card Game’ (TLCG), an experimental task where participants spontaneously choose whether to lie or not to another player, we tested the impact of the two major political ideologies –i.e. Conservatism and Liberalism- on moral decision making of politically nonaligned participants’. In separate blocks we primed 50 politically nonaligned participants with different stimuli (faces of conservative vs liberal politicians and words that can be associated to one of the two ideological categories) before playing the TLCG with some high vs low status players. In addition to the behavioural response, participants’ oculomotor behaviour was recorded. Regardless of the type of the priming, participants made more egoistic lies (produced to increase their payoff) to high status players and more altruistic lies (produced to share their payoff) to low status players. Oculomotor behaviour revealed that when provided with visual competing information regarding the status of the other player and the outcome of the game (win/lose) , participants tended to look more at the status of the player (high/low) after a Liberal priming. Conversely, when primed with a Conservative stimulus, participants tended to look more at the outcome of the game and, moreover, to lie less to high status players. In addition to that, Liberal priming led participants not only to take more time to decide whether to lie or not, but also –once they decided- to avoid the eye contact with the low status player’s picture shown at the end of each trial, suggesting some sort of feeling of shame. Although the ideological priming procedure does not show direct increase/decrease in participants’ tendency to lie, implicit indicators measured during the TLCG (i.e., participants’ oculomotor behaviour and temporal latency of the decision) seem to suggest that the two opposite ideologies differently influences social decision making towards people of different social status. This may be in keeping with previous research showing that endorsing a liberal ideology leads to a higher sensitiveness to social inequality and support for redistribution of richness, while conservative ideology is associated to maintaining the status quo and justifying the differences among people based on meritocracy.