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Article History

Received: 15 January 2026

Accepted: 25 May 2026

First Online: 28 May 2026

Declarations

Competing interests: The authors declare no competing interests.

Consent for publication: All participants provided explicit written consent for the publication of any data and findings arising from this study. Note that the present study did not involve personal or clinical details, nor any identifying images of participants. The consent process ensured that participants were fully aware of how their data would be used in the context of academic publication, and all data reported in this manuscript are presented in an anonymized form to protect participant confidentiality.

Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

Institutional review board statement: The study was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, and all four experiments (Experiments 1–4) were reviewed and approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee for Non-Clinical Faculties of the School of Psychology, South China Normal University (protocol number: SCNU-PSY-2020-2-016; date of approval: 20 May 2021). The approval explicitly covered: (1) the use of deception in Experiment 2 (i.e., deceiving participants into believing they were playing with real proposers); (2) the privacy protection of online sample data collected via Wenjuanxing (Experiments 1 and 4, including anonymous storage of device/IP information and de-identification of participant demographic data); and (3) the debriefing procedure for participants involved in deceptive experiments. All procedures complied with the committee’s requirements for protecting human research subjects.