Recipients of advice expect it to be both highly informed and honest. Suspecting either one of these attributes reduces the use of the advice. Does the degree of advice use depend on the reason for suspecting its accuracy? Five experiments tested the …
People lie more when they work as a group rather than alone. However, do people suspect and morally evaluate groups and individuals differently when they are suspiciously successful? In four experiments, we examine whether (a) suspiciously successful …
Does the potential victim of dishonest behavior—a family or a bank, a pensioner or an insurance firm—affect the propensity to engage in such behavior? We investigate the effect of victim type—an individual person or an impersonal institution—on …
In this paper we experimentally explore how lying changes when its consequences are not certain. We argue that, when consequences are not certain, lying is morally less costly because the action of lying does not mechanically result in the obtainment …
Corruption is often the product of coordinated rule violations. Here, we investigated how such corrupt collaboration emerges and spreads when people can choose their partners versus when they cannot. Participants were assigned a partner and could …
Organizational monitoring relies frequently on self-reports (e.g., work hours, progress reports, travel expenses). A “one-by-one” policy requires employees to submit a series of reports (e.g., daily or itemized reports). An “all-at-once” policy …
To some extent, unethical behavior results from people's limited attention to ethical considerations, which results in an ethical blind spot. Here, we focus on the role of ambiguity in shaping people's ethical blind spots, which in turn lead to their …
Unethical behavior by “ordinary” people poses significant societal and personal challenges. We present a novel framework centered on the role of self-serving justification to build upon and advance the rapidly expanding research on intentional …
Are people honest about the extent to which they engage in unethical behaviors? We report an experiment examining the relation between self-reported risky unethical tendencies and actual dishonest behavior. Participants' self-reported risk taking …
Firm moral judgment deems dishonest acts as categorically wrong, and considers any self-serving justification for them as further dishonesty. People, however, commonly use self-serving justifications in order to feel honest even as they behave …