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 impossibly quickly and leaving the room with the maximum reward. In line with social-norms theory, participants' level of unethical behavior increased when the confederate was an in-group member, but decreased when the confederate was an out-group member. In Experiment 2, our confederate instead asked a question about cheating, which merely strengthened the saliency of this possibility. This manipulation decreased the level of unethical behavior among the other group members. These results suggest that individuals' unethicality does not depend on the simple calculations of cost-benefit analysis, but rather depends on the social norms implied by the dishonesty of others and also on the saliency of dishonesty.

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 actions when such actions benefit others in addition to the self. Namely, our findings suggest that when people’s dishonesty would benefit others, they are more likely to view dishonesty as morally acceptable and thus feel less guilty about benefiting from cheating. We discuss the implications of these results for collaborations in the social realm.

Six studies demonstrate the -pot calling the kettle black‖ phenomenon whereby people are guilty of the very fault they identify in others. Recalling an undeniable ethical failure, people experience ethical dissonance between their moral values and their behavioral misconduct.Our findings indicate that to reduce ethical dissonance, individuals use a double-distancing mechanism. Using an overcompensating ethical code, they judge others more harshly and present themselves as more virtuous and ethical (Studies 1, 2, 3). We show this mechanism is exclusive for ethical dissonance and is not triggered by salience of ethicality (Study 4), general sense of personal failure, or ethically-neutral cognitive dissonance (Study 5). Finally, it is characterized by some boundary conditions (Study 6). We discuss the theoretical contribution of this work to research on moral regulation and ethical behavior.

Unethical behavior by "ordinary" people poses significant societal and personal challenges. We present a novel framework centered on the role of self-serving justification to build upon and advance the rapidly expanding research on intentional unethical behavior of people who value their morality highly. We propose that self-serving justifications emerging before and after people engage in intentional ethical violations mitigate the threat to the moral self, enabling them to do wrong while feeling moral. Pre-violation justifications lessen the anticipated threat to the moral self by redefining questionable behaviors as excusable. Post-violation justifications alleviate the experienced threat to the moral self through compensations that balance or lessen violations. We highlight the psychological mechanisms that prompt people to do wrong and feel moral, and suggest future research directions regarding the temporal dimension of self-serving justifications of ethical misconduct.

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