The influence of psychopathic traits on the acceptance of white-collar crime: do corporate psychopaths cook the books and misuse the news?

Lingnau, Volker; Fuchs, Florian; Dehne-Niemann, Till E.

doi:10.1007/s11573-017-0864-6

Cited by 30 publications

(19 citation statements)

References 80 publications

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“…DT personalities are characterized by social averseness, low levels of empathy and more callousness (Book et al 2015;Jonason and McCain 2012). Both high and low DT personalities are represented in the business world (Babiak, Neumann, and Hare 2010;Hobson et al 2019;Judge, Piccolo, and Kosalka 2009;Mathieu, Hare, Jones, Babiak, and Neumann 2013) and its components have been linked to fraud (Johnson et al 2013), white-collar crimes (Lingnau et al 2017;Murphy 2012) and tax avoidance (Olsen and Stekelberg 2016). Other work in accounting shows evidence consistent with the conjecture that DT managers behave with less integrity when pursuing their own goals (Majors 2016;Wang 2017).…”

Section: Dark Triad Personalitiesmentioning

confidence: 69%

“…In order to provide further theory-consistent evidence and give insights into the process that underlies image concern-driven earnings management, we examine how Dark Triad (DT) personality affects misreporting to avoid exactly meeting benchmarks. Prior work has found desirable (Hobson, Stern, and Zimbelman 2019) and undesirable (Johnson, Kuhn, Apostolou, and Hassell 2013;Lingnau, Fuchs, and Dehne-Niemann 2017;Majors 2016;Murphy 2012;Olsen and Stekelberg 2016; Wang 2017) aspects of the DT personality based upon its core feature that those who measure high in DT have less empathy and more aversion and callousness toward others (Book, Visser, and Volk 2015;Hobson et al 2019;Jonason and McCain 2012). In our setting, managers low in DT are more likely to worry about potentially skeptical market responses from exactly meeting a benchmark, since they are more attuned to how they are viewed by others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

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Managing Earnings to Appear Truthful: The Effect of Public Scrutiny on Exactly Meeting a Threshold

Stirnkorb¹

2020

Preprint

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The past two decades have not eliminated managers' willingness to manage earnings to meet and beat earnings thresholds, but have increased investors' skepticism of earnings that exactly meet those thresholds. Using a low-external-context experiment, we find that managers avoid exactly meeting a benchmark, even when they alter true earnings to do so. Thus, we examine a new incentive to manage earnings: misreporting to appear truthful. Specifically, we examine the effect of intensified scrutiny of managers and managers' individual sensitivity and concern about investors' perceptions of them. We find that when earnings exactly meet a benchmark, managers are more likely to misreport earnings when they report under high public scrutiny. This is particularly the case for managers who are low on the Dark Triad scale (and thus more sensitive to others' perceptions). Further, we show that this misreporting increases managers' belief that the market will accept their reports, consistent with managers misreporting for self-presentational goals. These results help explain otherwise undetectable behavior around earnings benchmarks and are important as managers are increasingly scrutinized by critical media, activists, and political oversight bodies, and as they face skepticism via more intimate forms of disclosure and communication, such as social media.

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Section: Dark Triad Personalitiesmentioning

confidence: 69%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Managing Earnings to Appear Truthful: The Effect of Public Scrutiny on Exactly Meeting a Threshold

Stirnkorb¹

2020

Preprint

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“…However, some of the studies used the same data set, resulting in 63 unique data sets. Several studies contained two separate useable data sets (Lingnau et al, 2017;N. L. Piquero et al, 2005;de Vries et al, 2017).…”

Section: Search Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Individual and Organizational Predictors of White-Collar Crime: A Meta-Analysis

Pusch

Holtfreter

2020

Journal of White Collar and Corporate Crime

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Studying white-collar crime presents challenges due to definitional disputes, variation in units of analysis, lack of data, and the use of proxy measures. This study employed multilevel meta-analytic methods to shed light on these issues. A total of 602 effect sizes using occupational or corporate crime as the dependent variable were included ( N = 54,205 individuals and 6,425 corporations), with predictor domains reflecting individual and organizational characteristics. Deterrence and positive personal traits showed the largest significant bivariate and multivariate effect sizes, respectively. Moderator analyses suggest that effects are largely stable regardless of whether the dependent variable reflects behavioral intentions or actual behavior, or cross-sectional or longitudinal designs are used.

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“…What is of interest to us here is that some individuals may score highly in callous affect and interpersonal manipulation, but not in erratic lifestyle and anti-social tendencies (Babiak and Hare 2007; Bate et al 2014; Lingnau et al 2017). Such individuals may be thought of as “successful psychopaths,” or “corporate psychopaths,” as we call them here (Boddy 2011b).…”

Section: Biomarkers For White-collar Crime?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Corporate psychopaths as such may be less likely than other corporate workers to have qualms about engaging in white-collar crime if it will further their interests. For instance, Lingnau et al (2017) found a highly significant relationship between personality traits associated with corporate psychopathy and the acceptance of accounting fraud and insider trading. Some have even argued that corporate psychopaths have played central roles in major corporate scandals in recent years, such as the Enron scandal in 2001, and the Chinese milk scandal in 2008.…”

Section: Biomarkers For White-collar Crime?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Biomarkers for the Rich and Dangerous: Why We Ought to Extend Bioprediction and Bioprevention to White-Collar Crime

Zohny

Douglas

Savulescu

2018

Criminal Law, Philosophy

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There is a burgeoning scientific and ethical literature on the use of biomarkers—such as genes or brain scan results—and biological interventions to predict and prevent crime. This literature on biopredicting and biopreventing crime focuses almost exclusively on crimes that are physical, violent, and/or sexual in nature—often called blue-collar crimes—while giving little attention to less conventional crimes such as economic and environmental offences, also known as white-collar crimes. We argue here that this skewed focus is unjustified: white-collar crime is likely far costlier than blue-collar crime in money, health, and lives lost. Moreover, attempts to biopredict and bioprevent blue-collar crime may entail adopting potentially unfair measures that target individuals who are already socio-economically disadvantaged, thus compounding pre-existing unfairness. We argue, therefore, that we ought to extend the study of bioprediction and bioprevention to white-collar crime as a means of more efficiently and fairly responding to crime. We suggest that identifying biomarkers for certain psychopathic traits, which appear to be over-represented among senior positions in corporate and perhaps political organisations, is one avenue through which this research can be broadened to include white-collar crime.

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The influence of psychopathic traits on the acceptance of white-collar crime: do corporate psychopaths cook the books and misuse the news?

Cited by 30 publications

References 80 publications

Managing Earnings to Appear Truthful: The Effect of Public Scrutiny on Exactly Meeting a Threshold

Managing Earnings to Appear Truthful: The Effect of Public Scrutiny on Exactly Meeting a Threshold

Individual and Organizational Predictors of White-Collar Crime: A Meta-Analysis

Biomarkers for the Rich and Dangerous: Why We Ought to Extend Bioprediction and Bioprevention to White-Collar Crime

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