Financial deprivation selectively shifts moral standards and compromises moral decisions

Choice architecture in conflicts of interest: Defaults as physical and psychological barriers to (dis)honesty

“…Participants were asked to engage in a computer-based visual perception ("Dots") task adopted from Mazar and Zhong (2010) that has been used to study deception to earn more money (see also Gino et al, 2010;Mazar et al, 2008b;Sharma et al, 2014; for people's perceptions of this task, see Appendix A).…”

Increasing wealth inequality may increase interpersonal hostility: The relationship between personal relative deprivation and aggression

“…In fact, feelings of personal relative deprivation were shown to be associated with delinquency (Agnew, 2001;Crosby, 1976). Indirect experimental evidence of the notion that personal relative deprivation increases aggression comes from work showing that participants who experience financial deprivation are more likely to cheat (Sharma, Mazar, Alter, & Ariely, 2014; see also Greenberg, 1993). Even more related, recent research (Greitemeyer & Sagioglou, 2016) has shown that low subjective socioeconomic status (SES) is associated with increased aggression.…”

Do Good Times Breed Cheats? Prosperous Times Have Immediate and Lasting Implications for CEO Misconduct

“…Consistent with this reasoning, recent work has shown that financial deprivation can loosen moral standards and increase the likelihood of engaging in immoral conduct (Sharma et al, 2014). Similarly, other work suggests that when organizations are under strain, corporate leaders are driven to alleviate this pressure through any means necessary, including engaging in illegal behavior (Staw and Szwajkowski, 1975;Finney and Lesieur, 1982;Vaughn, 1999).…”