Right on
The Morning Morality Effect: The Influence of Time of Day on Unethical Behavior
Maryam Kouchaki & Isaac Smith
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Are people more moral in the morning than in the afternoon? We propose that the normal, unremarkable experiences associated with everyday living can deplete one’s capacity to resist moral temptations. In a series of four experiments, both undergraduate students and a sample of U.S. adults engaged in less unethical behavior (e.g., less lying and cheating) on tasks performed in the morning than on the same tasks performed in the afternoon. This morning morality effect was mediated by decreases in moral awareness and self-control in the afternoon. Furthermore, the effect of time of day on unethical behavior was found to be stronger for people with a lower propensity to morally disengage. These findings highlight a simple yet pervasive factor (i.e., the time of day) that has important implications for moral behavior.
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Daniel Chen & Susan Yeh
Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, forthcoming
Abstract:
Laws may have indirect social effects that can either strengthen or attenuate the formal sanctions they impose. Recent theoretical advances argue that in communities where a proscribed activity is prevalent, permissive laws liberalize attitudes towards partakers and increase utility, thereby amplifying the direct effect of the law. The opposite occurs in communities where the proscribed activity is rare. Indirect social effects arise as laws cause individuals to update their beliefs about the prevalence of the proscribed activity. To test these predictions, we randomized data entry workers to transcribe newspaper summaries of liberal or conservative court decisions about obscenity and then randomly assigned one group to report their standards of morality and another group to estimate community standards with incentive pay for accuracy. Liberal decisions liberalize individual and perceived community standards of morality, yet frequent attendees of religious services become more conservative and perceive community standards becoming more liberal. Workers update beliefs about the prevalence of proscribed sexual activities differently in response to liberal or conservative decisions. Liberal obscenity decisions increase worker satisfaction overall, but decrease satisfaction among religious workers, who also identify more as Republican. These results provide causal evidence for a model predicting when law has backlash or expressive effects and suggests that legitimacy of law can affect utility and self-identification.
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Honest on Mondays: Honesty and the temporal separation between decisions and payoffs
Bradley Ruffle & Yossef Tobol
European Economic Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
We show that temporally distancing the decision task from the payment of the reward increases honest behavior. Each of 427 Israeli soldiers fulfilling their mandatory military service rolled a six-sided die in private and reported the outcome to the unit's cadet coordinator. For every point reported, the soldier received an additional half-hour early release from the army base on Thursday afternoon. Soldiers who participated on Sunday (the first work day of the week) are significantly more honest than those who participated later in the week. We derive practical implications for eliciting honesty.
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Financial Deprivation Selectively Shifts Moral Standards and Compromises Moral Decisions
Eesha Sharma et al.
Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research suggests people firmly value moral standards. However, research has also shown that various factors can compromise moral behavior. Inspired by the recent financial turmoil, we investigate whether financial deprivation might shift people’s moral standards and consequently compromise their moral decisions. Across one pilot survey and five experiments, we find that people believe financial deprivation should not excuse immoral conduct; yet when people actually experience deprivation they seem to apply their moral standards more leniently. Thus, people who feel deprived tend to cheat more for financial gains and judge deprived moral offenders who cheat for financial gains less harshly. These effects are mediated by shifts in people’s moral standards: beliefs in whether deprivation is an acceptable reason for immorality. The effect of deprivation on immoral conduct diminishes when it is explicit that immoral conduct cannot help alleviate imbalances in deprived actors’ financial states, when financial deprivation seems fair or deserved, and when acting immorally seems unfair.
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Does the Behavioral Immune System Prepare Females to Be Religiously Conservative and Collectivistic?
John Terrizzi, Russ Clay & Natalie Shook
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has indicated that females are more likely than males to endorse collectivistic values and religious conservatism. The present research investigated an evolutionary explanation for these sex differences. More specifically, the sex differences in social conservatism may be due to variation in the behavioral immune system (BIS). The BIS is a set of psychological mechanisms that are proposed to be evolved solutions to disease threat. Four studies were conducted to examine this evolutionary explanation. In Study 1, BIS measures (e.g., disgust sensitivity) fully mediated sex differences in collectivism. This effect was specific to sexual disgust (Study 2). In Studies 3 and 4, the effect was extended to other forms of social conservatism (i.e., religious conservatism) and measures of the BIS. Together, these results suggest that sex differences in collectivism and religious conservatism may be explained in part by sex differences in the BIS.
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Moral Character Predominates in Person Perception and Evaluation
Geoffrey Goodwin, Jared Piazza & Paul Rozin
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
What sorts of trait information do people most care about when forming impressions of others? Recent research in social cognition suggests that “warmth,” broadly construed, should be of prime importance in impression formation. Yet, some prior research suggests that information about others’ specifically moral traits — their moral “character” — may be a primary dimension. Although warmth and character have sometimes been conceived of as interchangeable, we argue that they are separable, and that across a wide variety of contexts, character is usually more important than warmth in impression formation. We first showed that moral character and social warmth traits are indeed separable (Studies 1 and 2). Further studies that used correlational and experimental methods showed that, as predicted, in most contexts, moral character information is more important in impression formation than is warmth information (Studies 2–6). Character information was also more important than warmth information with respect to judgments of traits’ perceived fundamentalness to identity, their uniquely human quality, their context-independence, and their controllability (Study 2). Finally, Study 7 used an archival method to show that moral character information appears more prominently than warmth information in obituaries, and more strongly determines the impressions people form of the individuals described in those obituaries. We discuss implications for current theories of person perception and social cognition.
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Withstanding moral disengagement: Attachment security as an ethical intervention
Dolly Chugh et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose an ethical intervention leading to improved ethical decision-making. Moral disengagement has long been related to unethical decision-making. We test an ethical intervention in which this relationship is broken. Our ethical intervention consisted of priming individuals to be securely-attached, in which they recalled a past instance of relational support and acceptance. We predicted and found an interaction between attachment state and moral disengagement, in which individuals primed with attachment security were able to withstand moral disengagement. In Study 1, we demonstrate the securely attached behave more ethically than the anxiously attached in an achievement context. In Study 2, we show that secure attachment overrides one’s natural propensity to morally disengage. In Study 3, we find that secure attachment minimizes the impact of the propensity to morally disengage through the mechanism of threat construal. Within both student and working adult samples and using both judgment and behavioral dependent variables, we show that the priming of secure attachment is a relatively simple and effective intervention that managers, educators, and organizations can use to reduce unethical behavior.
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How Power States Influence Consumers’ Perceptions of Price Unfairness
Liyin Jin, Yanqun He & Ying Zhang
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research explores how the power state interacts with comparative references in shaping consumer perceptions of price unfairness. Five experiments found that high-power consumers perceive stronger price unfairness when paying more than other consumers do, whereas low-power consumers perceive stronger unfairness when paying more than they themselves paid in previous transactions. The distinction occurs because consumers experience a threat to their self-importance from different types of disadvantaged comparisons depending on their power states. These results show that the state of power determines consumers’ respective channels for maintaining their self-importance and alters the relevance of different comparative standards.
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Alessandro Gabbiadini et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Violent video games glorify and reward immoral behaviors (e.g., murder, assault, rape, robbery, arson, motor vehicle theft). Based on the moral disengagement theory, we predicted that violent games would increase multiple immoral behaviors (i.e., lack of self-control, cheating, aggression), especially for people low in moral disengagement. High school students (N = 172) who had completed a measure of moral disengagement were randomly assigned to play one of the Grand Theft Auto (GTA) violent video games, or a nonviolent game. Self-control was measured using the weight of uneaten chocolates (i.e., M&M’s) in a bowl by the computer. After gameplay, participants could cheat on a test to win raffle tickets for attractive prizes (e.g., iPad). Aggression was measured using a competitive task in which participants could give an ostensible partner unpleasant noise blasts through headphones. Results showed that violent video games decreased self-control and increased cheating and aggression, especially for people high in moral disengagement.
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Rejecting Victims of Misfortune Reduces Delay Discounting
Mitchell Callan, Annelie Harvey & Robbie Sutton
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The derogation of innocent victims may bolster perceivers’ implicit faith that the world is a just place. A key theoretical outcome of this faith is the ability to put aside smaller, short-term rewards for larger, long-term rewards. The empirical relation between victim derogation and participants’ preferences for small-sooner versus larger-later rewards was examined in two studies using delay-discounting paradigms. In Study 1 (n = 381), the more college students and Internet users derogated a victim of misfortune, the less they subsequently discounted larger-later rewards, but only when their faith in justice was threatened (perpetrators of the misfortune were unpunished). In Study 2 (n = 238), informing Internet users that a victim was of bad (versus good) moral character decreased delay discounting. These results demonstrate that derogating victims of misfortune, although damaging to others, yields an important psychological benefit for the self by putting aside smaller-sooner rewards for larger-later rewards.
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The Role of Forgetting in Undermining Good Intentions
Kristina Olson et al.
PLoS ONE, November 2013
Abstract:
Evaluating others is a fundamental feature of human social interaction – we like those who help more than those who hinder. In the present research, we examined social evaluation of those who not only intentionally performed good and bad actions but also those to whom good things have happened (the lucky) and those to whom bad things have happened (the unlucky). In Experiment 1a, subjects demonstrated a sympathetic preference for the unlucky. However, under cognitive load (Experiment 1b), no such preference was expressed. Further, in Experiments 2a and 2b, when a time delay between impression formation (learning) and evaluation (memory test) was introduced, results showed that younger (Experiment 2a) and older adults (Experiment 2b) showed a significant preference for the lucky. Together these experiments show that a consciously motivated sympathetic preference for those who are unlucky dissolves when memory is disrupted. The observed dissociation provides evidence for the presence of conscious good intentions (favoring the unlucky) and the cognitive compromising of such intentions when memory fails.
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Relational Utility as a Moderator of Guilt in Social Interactions
Rob Nelissen
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The capacity to experience guilt is assumed to benefit individuals, as the rewards of repeated, cooperative interactions are likely to exceed the rewards of acting selfishly. If that assumption is true, the extent to which people experience guilt over interpersonal transgressions should at least partly depend on the utility of another person for the attainment of personal goal(s) through social interaction (relational utility). Three experiments confirmed the relational utility hypothesis by showing that people felt guiltier (a) over excluding someone from a fun game if this person could subsequently distribute more money in a dictator game, (b) over hypothetical social transgressions toward a person who was instrumental to the attainment of a salient goal than toward a person who was not instrumental to the attainment of that goal and toward the same person when no goal was salient, and (c) over a low contribution in a social dilemma game if they were more dependent on their group members for performing well in a subsequent debating contest. Closeness with the other person, differences in severity of the transgression, and strategic motives for expressing guilt were consistently excluded as alternative accounts of the effects. By showing that relational utility may affect guilt, these findings (a) provide support for the individual level function of guilt; (b) extend research on the antecedents of guilt in social interactions, which mainly focused on retrospective appraisals; and (c) bear implications for the status of guilt as a moral emotion.
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Bad Boys: The Effect of Criminal Identity on Dishonesty
Alain Cohn, Michel André Maréchal & Thomas Noll
University of Zurich Working Paper, October 2013
Abstract:
We conducted an experiment with 182 inmates from a maximum-security prison to analyze the impact of criminal identity on dishonest behavior. We randomly primed half of the prisoners to increase the mental saliency of their criminal identity, while treating the others as the control group. The results demonstrate that prisoners become more dishonest when we render their criminal identity more salient in their minds. An additional placebo experiment with regular citizens shows that the effect is specific to individuals with a criminal identity. Moreover, our experimental measure of dishonesty correlates with inmates’ offenses against in-prison regulation. Altogether, these findings suggest that criminal identity plays a crucial role in rule violating behavior.
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Are Ethicists Any More Likely to Pay Their Registration Fees at Professional Meetings?
Eric Schwitzgebel
Economics and Philosophy, November 2013, Pages 371-380
Abstract:
Lists of paid registrants at Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association from 2006–2008 were compared with lists of people appearing as presenters, commentators or chairs on the meeting programme those same years. These were years in which fee payment depended primarily on an honour system rather than on enforcement. Seventy-four per cent of ethicist participants and 76% of non-ethicist participants appear to have paid their meeting registration fees: not a statistically significant difference. This finding of no difference survives scrutiny for several possible confounds. Thus, professional ethicists seem no less likely to free-ride in this context than do philosophers not specializing in ethics. These data fit with other recent findings suggesting that on average professional ethicists behave no morally better than do professors not specializing in ethics.
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Jan-Willem van Prooijen, Jennifer Coffeng & Marjolijn Vermeer
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2014, Pages 190–201
Abstract:
In four studies, we investigated the effects of power on retributive justice judgments (i.e., the severity of punishment that people consider being fair). In Study 1, results revealed that participants who were primed with high power recommended more severe punishment than participants who were primed with low power, but only when the offender possessed negative character traits. In Study 2, these effects were replicated in an applied setting. In Study 3, we found that the inclination of power holders to base retributive justice judgments on negative traits only materialized when the power position was acquired legitimately. In Study 4, no trait information was given. Power again increased punishment, and this effect was mediated by trait appraisal ratings. It is concluded that legitimate power holders are more punitive due to their tendency to base retributive justice judgments on information or assumptions of negative traits that are stereotypically associated with offenders.
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Stephen Christman
Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior research indicates that consistent-handedness is associated with decreased access to right hemisphere processing and consequent decreased cognitive flexibility. Handedness differences on three dimensions of personality related to cognitive flexibility were investigated. Experiment 1 found that consistent-handedness was associated with decreased sensation seeking. Experiment 2 found that consistent-handedness was associated with increased Right Wing Authoritarianism. Experiment 3 found that consistent-handedness was associated with increased sensitivity to disgust. Prior research has shown associations between decreased sensation seeking, increased authoritarianism, and increased disgust sensitivity, and consistent-handedness appears to underlie all of these associations. Personality researchers are encouraged to include handedness as a factor in analyses, as failure to do so can lead to systematic mis-estimation of sex differences due to the over-representation of females among consistent-handers.
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Individual differences in posterior cortical volume correlate with proneness to pride and gratitude
Roland Zahn et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Proneness to specific moral sentiments (e.g. pride, gratitude, guilt, indignation) has been linked with individual variations in fMRI response within anterior brain regions whose lesion leads to inappropriate behaviour. However, the role of structural anatomical differences in rendering individuals prone to particular moral sentiments relative to others is unknown. Here, we investigated grey-matter volumes (VBM8) and proneness to specific moral sentiments on a well-controlled experimental task in healthy individuals. Individuals with smaller cuneus, and precuneus volumes were more pride-prone while those with larger right inferior temporal volumes experienced gratitude more readily. Although, the primary analysis detected no associations with guilt- or indignation-proneness, subgenual cingulate fMRI responses to guilt were negatively correlated with grey-matter volumes in the left superior temporal sulcus and anterior dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (right < left). This shows that individual variations in functional activations within critical areas for moral sentiments were not due to grey matter volume differences in the same areas. Grey matter volume differences between healthy individuals may nevertheless play an important role by affecting posterior cortical brain systems that are non-critical but supportive for the experience of specific moral sentiments. This may be of particular relevance when their experience depends on visuo-spatial elaboration.
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Value Judgments and the True Self
George Newman, Paul Bloom & Joshua Knobe
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The belief that individuals have a “true self” plays an important role in many areas of psychology as well as everyday life. The present studies demonstrate that people have a general tendency to conclude that the true self is fundamentally good — that is, that deep inside every individual, there is something motivating him or her to behave in ways that are virtuous. Study 1 finds that observers are more likely to see a person’s true self reflected in behaviors they deem to be morally good than in behaviors they deem to be bad. Study 2 replicates this effect and demonstrates observers’ own moral values influence what they judge to be another person’s true self. Finally, Study 3 finds that this normative view of the true self is independent of the particular type of mental state (beliefs vs. feelings) that is seen as responsible for an agent’s behavior.
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Cheating to win: Dishonesty and the intensity of competition
Edward Cartwright & Matheus Menez
Economics Letters, January 2014, Pages 55–58
Abstract:
We argue that the intensity of competition within a group or organization can have an important influence on whether or not people cheat. To make this point we first work through a simple model of strategic misreporting in the workplace. For low and high levels of competition we show that, in equilibrium, few are predicted to misreport. It is for medium levels of competition that misreporting is predicted to be highest. We test this prediction experimentally and find good support for it. This finding has implications for the design of incentive structures within groups and organizations.
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Belief Updating in Moral Dilemmas
Zachary Horne, Derek Powell & Joseph Spino
Review of Philosophy and Psychology, December 2013, Pages 705-714
Abstract:
Moral psychologists have shown that people’s past moral experiences can affect their subsequent moral decisions. One prominent finding in this line of research is that when people make a judgment about the Trolley dilemma after considering the Footbridge dilemma, they are significantly less likely to decide it is acceptable to redirect a train to save five people. Additionally, this ordering effect is asymmetrical, as making a judgment about the Trolley dilemma has little to no effect on people’s judgments about the Footbridge dilemma. We argue that this asymmetry is the result of a difference in how each dilemma affects people’s beliefs about the importance of saving lives. In two experiments, we show that considering the Footbridge dilemma disconfirms these beliefs, while considering the Trolley dilemma does not significantly affect them. Consistent with predictions of sequential learning models, our findings offer a clear and parsimonious account of the asymmetry in the ordering effect.
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Glenn Fox, Mona Sobhani & Lisa Aziz-zadeh
Frontiers in Psychology, October 2013
Abstract:
How does witnessing a hateful person in pain compare to witnessing a likable person in pain? The current study compared the brain bases for how we perceive likable people in pain with those of viewing hateful people in pain. While social bonds are built through sharing the plight and pain of others in the name of empathy, viewing a hateful person in pain also has many potential ramifications. In this functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study, Caucasian Jewish male participants viewed videos of (1) disliked, hateful, anti-Semitic individuals, and (2) liked, non-hateful, tolerant individuals in pain. The results showed that, compared with viewing liked people, viewing hateful people in pain elicited increased responses in regions associated with observation of physical pain (the insular cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the somatosensory cortex), reward processing (the striatum), and frontal regions associated with emotion regulation. Functional connectivity analyses revealed connections between seed regions in the left anterior cingulate cortex and right insular cortex with reward regions, the amygdala, and frontal regions associated with emotion regulation. These data indicate that regions of the brain active while viewing someone in pain may be more active in response to the danger or threat posed by witnessing the pain of a hateful individual more so than the desire to empathize with a likable person’s pain.