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- Faculty Publications (33)
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- Article
The Deception Spiral: Corporate Obfuscation Leads to Perceptions of Immorality and Cheating Behavior
By: D.M. Markowitz, M. Kouchaki, J.T. Hancock and F. Gino
In four studies, we evaluated how corporate misconduct relates to language patterns, perceptions of immorality, and unethical behavior. First, we analyzed nearly 190 codes of conduct from S&P 500 manufacturing companies and observed that corporations with ethics...
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- Article
'Many Others Are Doing It, So Why Shouldn't I?': How Being in Larger Competitions Leads to More Cheating
By: Celia Chui, Maryam Kouchaki and Francesca Gino
In many spheres of life, from applying for a job to participating in an athletic contest to vying for a date, we face competition. Does the size of the competition pool affect our propensity to behave unethically in our pursuit of the prize? We propose that it does....
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Keywords:
Unethical Behavior;
Cheating;
Competitors;
Social Norms;
Ethics;
Behavior;
Competition;
Societal Protocols
- Article
Cheating, Inequality Aversion, and Appealing to Social Norms
By: Clara Amato, Francesca Gino, Natalia Montinari and Pierluigi Sacco
We conduct a field experiment involving 143, 9-years old children in their classrooms. Children are requested to flip a coin in private and receive a big or a small prize depending on the outcome they report. Comparing the actual and theoretical distribution of...
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- May 2019
- Article
A Counterfeit Competence: After Threat, Cheating Boosts One's Self-Image
By: S. Wiley Wakeman, Celia Moore and F. Gino
In six studies, we show that after experiencing a threat to their abilities, individuals who misrepresent their performance as better than it actually is boost their feelings of competence. We situate these findings in the literature on self-protection. We show that...
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Keywords:
Cheating;
Self-perception;
Self-protection;
Competency and Skills;
Identity;
Perception;
Performance
- 2017
- Working Paper
The Impact of Campus Scandals on College Applications
By: Michael Luca, Patrick Rooney and Jonathan Smith
In recent years, there have been a number of high profile scandals on college campuses, ranging from cheating to hazing to rape. With so much information regarding a college’s academic and non-academic attributes available to students, how do these scandals affect...
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- January 2016
- Article
Blind Loyalty?: How Group Loyalty Makes Us See Evil or Engage in It
By: John Angus D. Hildreth, Francesca Gino and Max Bazerman
Loyalty often drives corruption. Corporate scandals, political machinations, and sports cheating highlight how loyalty's pernicious nature manifests in collusion, conspiracy, cronyism, nepotism, and other forms of cheating. Yet loyalty is also touted as an ethical...
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- October 2015
- Article
Hormones and Ethics: Understanding the Biological Basis of Unethical Conduct
By: Jooa Julie Lee, Francesca Gino, Ellie Shuo Jin, Leslie K. Rice and Robert A. Josephs
Globally, fraud has been rising sharply over the last decade, with current estimates placing financial losses at greater than $3.7 trillion dollars annually. Unfortunately, fraud prevention has been stymied by lack of a clear and comprehensive understanding of its...
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- August 19, 2015
- Article
The Slow Decay and Quick Revival of Self-deception
By: Zoe Chance, Francesca Gino, Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely
People demonstrate an impressive ability to self-deceive, distorting misbehavior to reflect positively on themselves—for example, by cheating on a test and believing that their inflated performance reflects their true ability. But what happens to self-deception when...
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- 2015
- Working Paper
Thick as Thieves? Dishonest Behavior and Egocentric Social Networks
By: Jooa Julia Lee, Dong-Kyun Im, Bidhan Parmar and Francesca Gino
People experience a threat to their moral self-concept in the face of discrepancies between their moral values and their unethical behavior. We theorize that people's need to restore their view of themselves as moral activates thoughts of a high-density personal social...
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- 2014
- Article
Morality Rebooted: Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs
Ethics research developed partly in response to calls from organizations to understand and solve unethical behavior. Departing from prior work that focused mainly on examining the antecedents and consequences of dishonesty, we examine two approaches to mitigating...
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Keywords:
Corruption;
Dishonesty;
Unethical Behavior;
Interventions;
Structure;
Values;
Behavior;
Ethics;
Moral Sensibility
- 2014
- Article
Time, Money, and Morality
By: F. Gino and C. Mogilner
Money, a resource that absorbs much daily attention, seems to be present in much unethical behavior thereby suggesting that money itself may corrupt. This research examines a way to offset such potentially deleterious effects—by focusing on time, a resource that tends...
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- April 2014
- Article
Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity
By: F. Gino and S. Wiltermuth
We propose that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: they both involve breaking rules. Because of this shared feature, creativity may lead to dishonesty (as shown in prior work), and dishonesty may lead to creativity (the hypothesis we tested in...
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- March 2014
- Article
Cheating More for Less: Upward Social Comparisons Motivate the Poorly Compensated to Cheat
By: Leslie K. John, George Loewenstein and Scott Rick
Intuitively, people should cheat more when cheating is more lucrative, but we find that the effect of performance-based pay rates on dishonesty depends on how readily people can compare their pay rate to that of others. In Experiment 1, participants were paid 5 cents...
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- 2014
- Article
The Burden of Guilt: Heavy Backpacks, Light Snacks, and Enhanced Morality
By: M. Kouchaki, F. Gino and A. Jami
Drawing on the embodied simulation account of emotional information processing, we argue that the physical experience of weight is associated with the emotional experience of guilt and thus that weight intensifies the experience of guilt. Across four studies, we found...
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- December 2013 (Revised September 2017)
- Case
Atlanta Schools: Measures to Improve Performance
By: Robert Simons and Natalie Kindred
The widespread cheating scandal that rocked the Atlanta public school system in 2010 and 2011 illustrates how high-stakes performance pressure, without sufficient risk controls, can drive dangerous behavior. After becoming superintendent of the low-income and...
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Keywords:
Atlanta;
Test;
Testing;
Standardized Test;
Standardized Testing;
No Child Left Behind;
NCLB;
Cheating;
Performance Pressure;
Measurement;
Incentives;
Atlanta Public Schools;
Management;
Leadership;
Ethics;
Performance;
Performance Evaluation;
Performance Expectations;
Risk Management;
Education;
Education Industry;
United States;
Georgia (state, US);
Atlanta
- October 2013
- Article
The Cheater's High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior
By: N. E. Ruedy, C. Moore, F. Gino and M. Schweitzer
Many theories of moral behavior assume that unethical behavior triggers negative affect. In this paper, we challenge this assumption and demonstrate that unethical behavior can trigger positive affect, which we term a "cheater's high." Across six studies, we find that...
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- September 2013
- Article
Self-serving Altruism? The Lure of Unethical Actions That Benefit Others
By: F. Gino, S. Ayal and D. Ariely
In three experiments, we propose and find that individuals cheat more when others can benefit from their cheating and when the number of beneficiaries of wrongdoing increases. Our results indicate that people use moral flexibility to justify their self-interested...
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Keywords:
Ethics;
Cheating;
Morality;
Moral Sensibility;
Behavior;
Decision Choices and Conditions;
Attitudes
- 2012
- Article
Signing at the Beginning Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-reports in Comparison to Signing at the End
By: L. Shu, N. Mazar, F. Gino, D. Ariely and M. Bazerman
Many written forms required by businesses and governments rely on honest reporting. Proof of honest intent is typically provided through signature at the end of the document, e.g., tax returns or insurance policy forms. Still, people sometimes cheat to advance their...
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Keywords:
Nudge;
Morality;
Honesty;
Self-report;
Policy-making;
Ethics;
Corporate Disclosure;
Reports;
Policy
- July 9, 2012
- Blog Post
Is It Cheating to Have a Side Project?
By: Leonard A. Schlesinger, Charles F. Kiefer and Paul B. Brown
- June 2012
- Article
Sweeping Dishonesty under the Rug: How Unethical Actions Lead to Forgetting of Moral Rules
By: Lisa L. Shu and Francesca Gino
Dishonest behavior can have various psychological outcomes. We examine whether one consequence could be the forgetting of moral rules. In four experiments, participants were given the opportunity to behave dishonestly, and thus earn undeserved money, by over-reporting...
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