Drawing the line somewhere: An experimental study of moral compromise

Abstract

In a study by Shalvi, Dana, Handgraaf and De Dreu (2011) it was convincingly demonstrated that psychologically, the distinction between right and wrong is not discrete, rather it is a continuous distribution of relative 'rightness' and 'wrongness'. Using the 'die-underthe-cup' paradigm participants over-reported high numbers on the roll of a die when there were financial incentives to do so and no chance of detection for lying. Participants generally did not maximize income, instead making moral compromises. In an adaptation of this procedure in a single die experiment 9% of participants lied that they had rolled a '6' when they had not compared to 2.5% in the Shalvi et.al. study suggesting that when the incentive is donation to charity this encourages more dishonesty than direct personal gain. In a follow-up questionnaire study where sequences of three rolls were presented, lying increased where counterfactuals became available as predicted by Shalvi et.al. A novel finding is reported where 'justified' lying is more common when comparative gains are higher.An investigation of individual differences revealed that economics students were much more likely to lie than psychology students. Relevance to research on tax evasion, corporate social responsibility and the 'credit crunch' is discussed.JEL Classification: A11,A12,D03,D6,H26. PsychInfo: 2340,3040.

Experimental Criminal Law. A Survey of Contributions from Law, Economics and Criminology

“…If participants do not cheat, all 6 options should be reported with the same frequency. Actually only 6.4% report 6, while 35.0% report 5, and 27.2% report 4 (a similar finding is Lewis, Bardis et al 2012). The authors conclude that there is dishonest reporting, but that many participants do not lie maximally.…”

Not competent enough to know the difference? Gender stereotypes about women’s ease of being misled predict negotiator deception

“…The ability to rationalize dishonest behavior is often a critical precursor to unethical behavior (Gino & Ariely, 2012;Lewis et al, 2012;Shalvi, Dana, Handgraaf, & De Dreu, 2011) and perceiving a counterpart as too incompetent to scrutinize deception may provide a better justification for deception than simply being too nice. These results suggest that deception in distributive negotiations may be a form of succumbing to moral temptation (Monin, Pizarro, & Beer, 2007) posed by the perception that a negotiating counterpart ''had it coming'' by lacking competence.…”

Cheating in the workplace: An experimental study of the impact of bonuses and productivity

“…(Grover, 1993, p. 478) 4 Our methodology for measuring cheating is related to a recent wave of experimental studies that use a report of a privately-known outcome as an indicator of cheating or dishonesty. These papers use a 'hard' form of cheating or deception, where subjects report the outcome of a coin flip (Bucciol and Piovesan, 2011;Houser et al, 2012;Abeler et al, 2012), a die roll (Fischbacher and Heusi, 2008;Lammers et al, 2010;Conrads et al, 2013;Fischbacher and Utikal, 2011;Hao and Houser, 2011;Shalvi et al, 2011;Suri et al, 2011;Cojoc and Stoian, 2012;Lewis et al, 2012;Shalvi et al, forthcoming) or some other random variable (Coricelli et al, 2010;Eisenkopf et al, 2011). Some studies ask subjects to report their score on a task (e.g., Mazar et al, 2008;Cadsby et al, 2010;Schwieren and Weichselbaumer, 2010).…”