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Publications
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- Faculty Publications (7)
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- 2021
- Working Paper
False Signaling and Personal Moral Failings: Two Distinct Pathways to Hypocrisy with Unequal Moral Weight
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Roseanna Sommers
Moral engagement is a key feature of human nature: we hold moral values, condemn those who violate those values, and attempt to adhere to them ourselves. Yet moral engagement can make us appear hypocritical if we fail to behave morally. When does moral engagement risk...
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- August 2020 (Revised November 2020)
- Case
George Soros: The Stateless Statesman
By: Geoffrey Jones and Wendy Ying
This case traces the business career and philanthropic activities of George Soros. The Hungarian-born Soros made a fortune as a hedge fund investor after establishing Quantum Fund on the tax haven island of Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles in 1973 where he was...
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- Article
Signaling When Nobody Is Watching: A Reputation Heuristics Account of Outrage and Punishment in One-shot Anonymous Interactions
By: Jillian J. Jordan and David G. Rand
Moralistic punishment can confer reputation benefits by signaling trustworthiness to observers. However, why do people punish even when nobody is watching? We argue that people often rely on the heuristic that reputation is typically at stake, such that reputation...
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Keywords:
Signaling;
Morality;
Trustworthiness;
Anger;
Third-party Punishment;
Moral Sensibility;
Behavior;
Trust;
Reputation
- January 2018
- Case
Merck CEO Ken Frazier Quits President Trump's Advisory Council
By: Andy Zelleke and Brian Tilley
In the first six months of Donald Trump’s presidency, Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier appeared alongside Trump at least three times at press events, one of which commemorated the first and only meeting of the president’s Manufacturing Job Initiative (better known at the...
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- March 2017
- Article
Creativity in Unethical Behavior Attenuates Condemnation and Breeds Social Contagion: When Transgressions Seem to Create Little Harm
By: Scott S. Wiltermuth, Lynne C. Vincent and F. Gino
Across six studies, people judged creative forms of unethical behavior to be less unethical than less creative forms of unethical behavior, particularly when the unethical behaviors imposed relatively little direct harm on victims. As a result of perceiving behaviors...
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- March 2017
- Article
Why Do We Hate Hypocrites? Evidence for a Theory of False Signaling
By: Jillian J. Jordan, Roseanna Sommers, Paul Bloom and David G. Rand
Why do people judge hypocrites, who condemn immoral behaviors that they in fact engage in, so negatively? We propose that hypocrites are disliked because their condemnation sends a false signal about their personal conduct, deceptively suggesting that they behave...
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- Forthcoming
- Book
Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop
By: Max H. Bazerman
It is easy to condemn obvious wrongdoers such as Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, Harvey Weinstein, and the Sackler family. But we rarely think about the many people who supported their unethical or criminal behavior. In each case there was a supporting cast of...
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