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- October 2022
- Article
When Does Moral Engagement Risk Triggering a Hypocrite Penalty?
By: Jillian J. Jordan and Roseanna Sommers
Society suffers when people stay silent on moral issues. Yet people who engage morally may appear hypocritical if they behave imperfectly themselves. Research reveals that hypocrites can—but do not always—trigger a “hypocrisy penalty,” whereby they are evaluated...
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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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- Article
Signing at the Beginning vs at the End Does Not Decrease Dishonesty
By: Ariella S. Kristal, A.V. Whillans, Max Bazerman, Francesca Gino, Lisa Shu, Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely
Honest reporting is essential for society to function well. However, people frequently lie when asked to provide information, such as misrepresenting their income to save money on taxes. A landmark finding published in PNAS (Shu, Mazar, Gino, Ariely, and Bazerman,...
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- December 2019
- Article
The Ethical Perils of Personal, Communal Relations: A Language Perspective
By: Maryam Kouchaki, Francesca Gino and Yuval Feldman
The current paper focuses on how the type of relationship that exists between a group and its members influences misconduct by fostering certain perceptions of the group. Using multiple methods, lab- and field-based experiments (N = 1,679), and a large dataset of S&P...
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- September 2019
- Article
The Interpersonal Costs of Dishonesty: How Dishonest Behavior Reduces Individuals' Ability to Read Others' Emotions
By: J.J. Lee, H. Hardin, B. Parmar and F. Gino
In this research, we examine the unintended consequences of dishonest behavior for one’s interpersonal abilities and subsequent ethical behavior. Specifically, we unpack how dishonest conduct can reduce one’s generalized empathic accuracy—the ability to accurately read...
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- 2016
- Chapter
Dishonesty Explained: What Leads Moral People To Act Immorally
By: F. Gino and D. Ariely
The last two decades have witnessed what seems to be an increasing number of cases of dishonesty, from corporate corruption and employee misconduct to questionable behaviors during the financial crisis and individual acts of unethical behavior in many spheres of...
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- Article
Three Principles to REVISE People's Unethical Behavior
By: Shahar Ayal, Francesca Gino, Rachel Barkan and Dan Ariely
Dishonesty and unethical behavior are widespread in the public and private sectors and cause immense annual losses. For instance, estimates of U.S. annual losses indicate $1 trillion paid in bribes, $270 billion lost due to unreported income, as well as $42 billion...
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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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- October 2013
- Article
License to Cheat: Voluntary Regulation and Ethical Behavior
By: F. Gino, E. Krupka and R. Weber
While monitoring and regulation can be used to combat socially costly unethical conduct, their intended targets are often able to avoid regulation or hide their behavior. This surrenders at least part of the effectiveness of regulatory policies to firms' and...
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Keywords:
Ethical Behavior;
Dishonesty;
Regulation;
Selection;
Social Norms;
Behavior;
Ethics;
Societal Protocols
- 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
- 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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- March 2012
- Article
The Dark Side of Creativity: Original Thinkers Can Be More Dishonest
By: F. Gino and D. Ariely
Creativity is a common aspiration for individuals, organizations, and societies. Here, however, we test whether creativity increases dishonesty. We propose that a creative personality and a creative mindset promote individuals' ability to justify their behavior, which,...
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- December 2012
- Article
Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty
By: Max Bazerman and Francesca Gino
Early research and teaching on ethics focused on either a moral development perspective or philosophical approaches, and used a normative approach by focusing on the question of how people should act when resolving ethical dilemmas. In this paper, we briefly describe...
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- February 2011
- Article
Bounded Ethicality in Negotiations
By: Max Bazerman
Routine and persistent acts of dishonesty prevail in everyday life, yet most people resist shining a critical moral light on their own behavior, thereby maintaining and oftentimes inflating images of themselves as moral individuals. We overview the psychology that...
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- Article
Good Lamps Are the Best Police: Darkness Increases Dishonesty and Self-Interested Behavior
By: C. B. Zhong, V. K. Bohns and F. Gino
Keywords:
Behavior
- Article
Contagion and Differentiation in Unethical Behavior: The Effect of One Bad Apple on the Barrel
By: F. Gino, S. Ayal and D. Ariely
In a world where encounters with dishonesty are frequent, it is important to know if exposure to other people's unethical behavior can increase or decrease an individual's dishonesty. In Experiment 1, our confederate cheated ostentatiously by finishing a task...
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