Jekyll and Hyde
Miao Hu, Derek Rucker & Adam Galinsky
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, June 2016, Pages 826-837
Abstract:
Ample evidence documents that power increases unethical behavior. This article introduces a new theoretical framework for understanding when power leads to more versus less unethical behavior. Our key proposition is that people hold expectations about power that are both descriptive (how the powerful do behave) and prescriptive (how the powerful should behave). People hold descriptive beliefs that the powerful do behave more unethically than the powerless, but they hold prescriptive beliefs that the powerful should behave more ethically than the powerless. Whichever expectation - descriptive or prescriptive - is salient affects how power influences one's behavior. Three experiments demonstrate that activating descriptive expectations for power leads the powerful to cheat more than the powerless, whereas activating prescriptive expectations leads the powerful to cheat less than the powerless. The current work offers new ideas for curbing unethical behavior by those with power: focus their attention on prescriptive expectations for power.
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Jared Piazza & Steve Loughnan
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Why are many Westerners outraged by dog meat, but comfortable with pork? This is particularly puzzling, given strong evidence that both species are highly intelligent. We suggest that although people consider intelligence a key factor in determining animals' moral status, they disregard this information when it is self-relevant. In Study 1, we show that intelligence plays a major role in the moral concern afforded to animals in the abstract. In Study 2, we manipulated the intelligence of three animals - pigs, tapirs, and a fictional animal - and find that only for pigs does this information not influence moral standing. Finally, in Study 3, we show that people believe that learning about pig intelligence will lead to high levels of moral concern, yet when they themselves learn about pig intelligence, moral concern remains low. These findings demonstrate an important, predictable inconsistency in how people think about minds and moral concern.
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A Sorrow Shared Is a Sorrow Halved: Moral Judgments of Harm to Single versus Multiple Victims
Daffie Konis et al.
Frontiers in Psychology, August 2016
Abstract:
We describe a bias in moral judgment in which the mere existence of other victims reduces assessments of the harm suffered by each harmed individual. Three experiments support the seemingly paradoxical relationship between the number of harmed individuals and the perceived severity of the harming act. In Experiment 1a, participants expressed lower punitive intentions toward a perpetrator of an unethical act that hurt multiple people and assigned lower monetary compensation to each victim than did those who judged a similar act that harmed only one person. In Experiment 1b, participants displayed greater emotional involvement in the case of a single victim than when there were multiple victims, regardless of whether the victims were unrelated and unaware of each other or constituted a group. Experiment 2 measured the responses of the victims themselves. Participants received false performance feedback on a task before being informed that they had been deceived. Victims who were deceived alone reported more negative feelings and judged the deception as more immoral than did those who knew that others had been deceived as well. Taken together, these results suggest that a victim's plight is perceived as less severe when others share it, and this bias is common to both third-party judges and victims.
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The role of mortality awareness in hero identification
Simon McCabe, Ryan Carpenter & Jamie Arndt
Self and Identity, November/December 2016, Pages 707-726
Abstract:
Three studies examine hypotheses derived from terror management theory to investigate the relationship between mortality concerns and hero identification. Study 1 found reminders of death, followed by a distraction task and a self-prime, led to greater inclusion of heroes in the self. Study 2 found that writing about a personal hero, but not other's heroes or acquaintances, led to lower death-thought accessibility after being reminded of mortality. Finally, Study 3 found that after death reminders, participants led to identify with a hero exemplifying traits of legacy and/or sacrifice showed lower death thought accessibility. Findings are discussed as generative for heroism research, informing a previously overlooked motivation underlying hero identification and the existential function of such identification.
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How Much Does Honesty Cost? Small Bonuses Can Motivate Ethical Behavior
Long Wang & Keith Murnighan
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although people generally try to avoid lying, the lure of potential monetary payoffs often leads to unethical behavior. The current research investigates whether small monetary rewards for honesty help people resist the temptations of larger incentives or whether they backfire and lead to even more dishonesty. Four experiments address these issues. Experiment 1 shows that a $1 bonus led people to act more honestly when they could have lied to obtain $4; an identical bonus, however, did not increase dishonesty. Experiment 2 uses a different context and again shows that a $1 bonus led people to act more honestly; it also finds no evidence that this small payoff crowded out subsequent altruistic behavior. Experiment 3 shows that a $1 bonus increased people's honesty even when the payoffs for lying increased to $8, $12, and $16, but not when the payoff for lying increased to $20. Experiment 4 finds that smaller bonuses for honesty still had an impact, although it tended to be somewhat weaker. In addition, compared with no bonus, the combined effect of several small monetary bonuses (1 dollar, 75 cents, 50 cents, and 25 cents) marginally reduced lying.
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Slow motion increases perceived intent
Eugene Caruso, Zachary Burns & Benjamin Converse
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 16 August 2016, Pages 9250-9255
Abstract:
To determine the appropriate punishment for a harmful action, people must often make inferences about the transgressor's intent. In courtrooms and popular media, such inferences increasingly rely on video evidence, which is often played in "slow motion." Four experiments (n = 1,610) involving real surveillance footage from a murder or broadcast replays of violent contact in professional football demonstrate that viewing an action in slow motion, compared with regular speed, can cause viewers to perceive an action as more intentional. This slow motion intentionality bias occurred, in part, because slow motion video caused participants to feel like the actor had more time to act, even when they knew how much clock time had actually elapsed. Four additional experiments (n = 2,737) reveal that allowing viewers to see both regular speed and slow motion replay mitigates the bias, but does not eliminate it. We conclude that an empirical understanding of the effect of slow motion on mental state attribution should inform the life-or-death decisions that are currently based on tacit assumptions about the objectivity of human perception.
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A Subjective Utilitarian Theory of Moral Judgment
Dale Cohen & Minwhoo Ahn
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Current theories hypothesize that moral judgments are difficult because rational and emotional decision processes compete. We present a fundamentally different theory of moral judgment: the Subjective Utilitarian Theory of moral judgment. The Subjective Utilitarian Theory posits that people try to identify and save the competing item with the greatest "personal value." Moral judgments become difficult only when the competing items have similar personal values. In Experiment 1, we estimate the personal values of 104 items. In Experiments 2-5, we show that the distributional overlaps of the estimated personal values account for over 90% of the variance in reaction times (RTs) and response choices in a moral judgment task. Our model fundamentally restructures our understanding of moral judgments from a competition between decision processes to a competition between similarly valued items.
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Effects of Experienced Disgust on Morally-Relevant Judgments
Bunmi Olatunji, Bieke David Puncochar & Rebecca Cox
PLoS ONE, August 2016
Abstract:
Although disgust has been implicated in moral judgments, the extent to which the influence of disgust on moral judgment is distinct from other negative affective states remains unclear. To address this gap in knowledge, participants in Study 1 were randomized to a disgust (hand submersion in imitation vomit), discomfort (hand submersion in ice water), or neutral (hand submersion in room temperature water) affect condition while moral judgments of offenses were simultaneously assessed. The results showed that participants in the discomfort condition made the most severe moral judgments, particularly for moderate offenses. To examine if disgust may have more of an effect on some moral violations than others, participants in Study 2 were randomized to similar affect inductions while judgments of purity and non-purity offenses were simultaneously assessed. The results showed that those who had their hand submerged in imitation vomit recommended harsher punishment for purity violations relative to moral violations unrelated to purity. The opposite was true for those who submerged their hands in ice water, whereas punishment ratings for purity and non-purity violations did not significantly differ for those who submerged their hands in room temperature water. The implications of these findings for further delineating the specific role of experienced disgust in moral decision-making are discussed.
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Promoting Forgiveness Through Psychological Distance
Sana Rizvi & Ramona Bobocel
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We examined whether psychological distance from interpersonal transgressions can promote victim forgiveness via high-level construal. Participants responded to conflict vignettes. In Experiment 1, we found a positive effect of temporal distance on forgiveness, mediated by construal level. In Experiment 2, we found a positive effect of physical distance on construal level (2a) and a positive effect of construal level on forgiveness (2b). In Experiment 3, we found that construal level promotes forgiveness via reduced perceptions of transgression severity. Together, our experiments demonstrate that increasing victims' psychological distance from interpersonal transgressions promotes forgiveness due to high-level construal. Implications for construal level theory and for research on forgiveness are discussed.
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Overcoming the outcome bias: Making intentions matter
Ovul Sezer et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, November 2016, Pages 13-26
Abstract:
People often make the well-documented mistake of paying too much attention to the outcomes of others' actions while neglecting information about the original intentions leading to those outcomes. In five experiments, we examine interventions aimed at reducing this outcome bias in situations where intentions and outcomes are misaligned. Participants evaluated an individual with fair intentions leading to unfavorable outcomes, an individual with selfish intentions leading to favorable outcomes, or both individuals jointly. Contrary to our initial predictions, participants weighed others' outcomes more - not less - when these individuals were evaluated jointly rather than separately (Experiment 1). Consequently, separate evaluators were more intention-oriented than joint evaluators when rewarding and punishing others (Experiment 2a) and assessing the value of repeated interactions with these individuals in the future (Experiment 2b). Third-party recommenders were less outcome-biased in allocating funds to investment managers when making separate evaluations relative to joint evaluations (Experiment 3). Finally, raising the salience of intentions prior to discovering outcomes helped joint evaluators overcome the outcome bias, suggesting that joint evaluation made attending to information about intentions more difficult (Experiment 4). Our findings bridge decision-making research on the outcome bias and management research on organizational justice by investigating the role of intentions in evaluations.
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To Cheat or Not To Cheat: Tryptophan Hydroxylase 2 SNP Variants Contribute to Dishonest Behavior
Qiang Shen et al.
Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, May 2016
Abstract:
Despite the considerable role of heredity in explaining individual differences in deceptive behavior, few studies have investigated which specific genes contribute to the heterogeneity of lying behavior across individuals. Also, little is known concerning which specific neurotransmitter pathways underlie deception. Toward addressing these two key questions, we implemented a neurogenetic strategy and modeled deception by an incentivized die-under-cup task in a laboratory setting. The results of this exploratory study provide provisional evidence that SNP variants across the tryptophan hydroxylase 2 (TPH2) gene, that encodes the rate-limiting enzyme in the biosynthesis of brain serotonin, contribute to individual differences in deceptive behavior.
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The Wages of Dishonesty: The Supply of Cheating under High-Powered Incentives
Parasuram Balasubramanian, Victor Manuel Bennett & Lamar Pierce
Washington University in Saint Louis Working Paper, July 2016
Abstract:
We use a novel design to identify how dishonesty changes through a broad reward range that, at the high end, exceeds participants' average daily wages. Using a sample of online Indian workers who earn bonuses based on six simultaneous coin flips, we show that the relationship between dishonesty and financial rewards depends on the incentive range. We find two novel effects as incentives exceed those used in prior research. First, dishonesty increases and reaches its maximum as rewards increase from $0.50 to $3 per reported head and as earnings reach $15, indicating that rewards can indeed motivate more cheating when large enough. More importantly, we show that dishonesty declines at the highest reward levels (up to $5 per head) as individuals appear to engage in lower magnitudes of dishonesty. We explain how our results could be explained by a reference-dependent utility with internal costs of dishonesty that are convex in the magnitude of the lie, and show survey and simulation-based evidence that support this explanation.
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Avital Mentovich et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research examines how psychological distance influences the weight given to individuating information about targets of justice judgments. Drawing on construal level theory, which links psychological distance to levels of construal, we hypothesize that increasing psychological distance from justice judgments reduces people's sensitivity to specific features of targets, thereby minimizing the extent to which applications of justice are influenced by target-specific information. Psychological proximity, by contrast, enhances the salience of targets' idiosyncratic characteristics, thereby leading to applications of justice that are more sensitive to targets' identity. Six studies, examining various justice principles, support these conclusions. Studies 1 to 3 show that psychological distancing reduces the weight of target-specific features in justice judgments. Supporting the role of construal level in driving these results, Studies 4 to 6 demonstrate parallel patterns when construal level is manipulated directly. This work offers a novel outlook on the role of construal and target characteristics in moral exclusion.
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Jeffrey Sinn & Matthew Hayes
Political Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) explains liberal-conservative differences as arising from different moral intuitions, with liberals endorsing "individualizing" foundations (Harm and Fairness) and conservatives also endorsing "binding" foundations (Authority, Respect, and Purity). We argue these labels misconstrue ideological differences and propose Evolutionary-Coalitional Theory (ECT) as an alternative, explaining how competitive dynamics in the ancestral social environment could produce the observed ideological differences. We test ECT against MFT across three studies. Study 1 shows the so-called "binding" orientation entails the threat-sensitivity and outgroup antagonism predicted by ECT; that is, an authoritarian motive. Similarly, Study 2 shows the so-called "individualizing" orientation is better described as a universalizing motive, one reflecting a broader set of moral commitments (e.g., to nature) and a broader sociality than the egocentrism implied by MFT. Study 3 provides a factor analysis reducing "binding" to authoritarianism and "individualizing" to universalism, with the latter loading against social dominance orientation (SDO). A hierarchical regression then provides additional evidence for ECT, showing this dominating motive (SDO) accounts for variance in conservatism that MFT leaves unexplained. Collectively, these three studies suggest that ECT offers a more accurate and precise explanation of the key psychological differences between liberals and conservatives.
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Keith Leavitt, Lei Zhu & Karl Aquino
Journal of Business Ethics, September 2016, Pages 785-800
Abstract:
The role of moral intuition (i.e., a set of implicit processes which occur automatically and at the fringe of conscious awareness) has been increasingly implicated in business decisions and (un)ethical business behavior. But troublingly, because implicit processes often operate outside of conscious awareness, decision makers are generally unaware of their influence. We tested whether subtle contextual cues for identity can alter implicit beliefs. In two studies, we found that contextual cues which nonconsciously prime moral identity weaken the implicit association between the categories of "business" and "ethical," an implicit association which has previously been linked to unethical decision making. Further, changes in this implicit association mediated the relationship between contextually primed moral identity and concern for external stakeholder groups, regardless of self-reported moral identity. Thus, our results show that subtle contextual cues can lead individuals to render more ethical judgments, by automatically restructuring moral intuition below the level of consciousness.
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Please be Honest and Provide Evidence: Deterrents of Deception in an Online Insurance Fraud Context
Sharon Leal et al.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present experiment examined whether people could be deterred from lying in an online insurance claim setting. A total of 96 participants were asked to submit a theft insurance claim. Reflecting real life, submitting a claim that went beyond the actual costs of the stolen items was associated with advantages and disadvantages. Two deterrence factors were introduced: asking claimants to provide evidence that they actually owned the stolen items (Evidence Instruction, often used by insurers) and asking participants to read out before starting to submit the claim that they will be truthful (Honesty Statement, not often used by insurers). We also examined at what stage of the interview claimants embedded their lies in their otherwise truthful stories. The honesty statement but not the evidence instruction made claimants more honest, and participants lied more as the interview progressed.