Intrinsic motivation in a virtual reality mock crime affects participants’ willingness to invest more effort in deceptive interviews

Authors

Isabella S. Branson, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Craig P. Speelman, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow
Shane L. Rogers, Edith Cowan UniversityFollow

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Title

Scientific Reports

Volume

14

Issue

1

Publisher

Nature

School

School of Arts and Humanities

RAS ID

64641

Funders

Edith Cowan University

Comments

Branson, I. S., Speelman, C. P., & Rogers, S. L. (2024). Intrinsic motivation in a virtual reality mock crime affects participants’ willingness to invest more effort in deceptive interviews. Scientific Reports, 14, article 33. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-50515-4

Abstract

In studies of investigative interviewing, it is not well understood how participant experience of mock-crime activities might affect participants’ desire to perform (well) in subsequent interviews. In this study, we utilized two immersive virtual reality mock-crimes to examine if participants’ intrinsic motivation (i.e., competence, autonomy, relatedness) while committing the virtual mock-crime affects their desire to perform well in interviews. We also examined if the self-reported feeling of presence during the virtual reality mock-crime is associated with participants’ intrinsic motivation. We found significant positive associations between presence and all intrinsic motivation variables in both truth and lie conditions. We also found that competence and relatedness significantly predicted the self-reported effort to perform well in interviews. We discuss these results in the context of prior literature and provide recommendations for researchers on the design of mock-crime experiences.

DOI

10.1038/s41598-023-50515-4

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.