Is the victim Max (Planck) or Moritz? How victim type and social value orientation affect dishonest behavior

Abstract

Does the potential victim of dishonest behavior—a family or a bank, a pensioner or an insurance firm—affect the propensity to engage in such behavior? We investigate the effect of victim type—an individual person or an impersonal institution—on dishonest behavior and test whether it interacts with potential perpetrators' social value orientation (prosocial or proself). In a between‐subjects design, we allowed experimental participants (N = 368) to misreport private information in order to increase (decrease) their profit (loss) at the expense of either another participant or the experimenter's budget. Both prosocials and proselfs engaged in dishonesty, but proselfs did so much more. Furthermore, prosocials reduced their dishonesty when the victim was another person, rather than an institution, but proselfs did not. A direct implication is that the dishonesty of prosocials may be curbed by increasing the salience of the adverse effect their dishonesty has on other individual people but that such interventions will not be effective for proselfs. In contrast with recent results, we did not find a general effect of increased dishonesty under a loss (vs. gain) frame.

Unethical employee behavior against coworkers following unkind management treatment: An experimental analysis

“…The authors find more honest reports when the deprived party shared the same group identity (fellow student vs experimenter). Similar results were obtained by Hermann and Ostermaier (2018) and Soraperra et al (2019).…”

Business-Size Bias in Moral Concern: People are More Dishonest Against Big than Small Organizations

“…As a possible implication, large and growing organizations might be facing a moral "size-penalty" in the marketplace, by attracting consumers that act in somewhat less honest and trustworthy ways than they would have done towards a small business. Our findings add to the growing literature on how victim characteristics can affect dishonesty (Gino & Pierce, 2009;Rotman et al, 2018;Soraperra et al, 2019).…”

Lying to Individuals Versus Lying to Groups

“…Previous literature has considered lying to a single individual versus lying to a group, where the group is represented either by the organization of the experimenter, i.e., an experimental budget (Gneezy and Kajackaite (2020), Soraperra et al (2019), Meub et al (2016), Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi (2013)), a fictitious company (Bersoff, 1999), or a group of actual individuals (Amir et al, 2016). These studies either find no difference in lying behavior toward victims of different kind or they find that individuals are cheated less than groups.…”