Morality in minimally deceptive environments.

Abstract

Psychologists, economists, and philosophers have long argued that in environments where deception is normative, moral behavior is harmed. In this article, we show that individuals making decisions within minimally deceptive environments do not behave more dishonestly than in nondeceptive environments. We demonstrate the latter using an example of experimental deception within established institutions, such as laboratories and institutional review boards. We experimentally manipulated whether participants received information about their deception. Across three well-powered studies, we empirically demonstrate that minimally deceptive environments do not affect downstream dishonest behavior. Only when participants were in a minimally deceptive environment and aware of being observed, their dishonest behavior decreased. Our results show that the relationship between deception and dishonesty might be more complicated than previous interpretations have suggested and expand the understanding of how deception might affect (im)moral behavior. We discuss possible limitations and future directions as well as the applied nature of these findings.

Communication Increases Collaborative Corruption

“…When working in collaborative settings, dishonesty can be contagious and spread among group members (Gross et al, 2018) and the impact of collaboration on corrupt behaviors has been related to various factors, including diffusion of responsibility and moral justifications (Conrads et al, 2013;Kocher et al, 2018), perceived similarity (Irlenbusch et al, 2020), commitment (Zickfeld et al, 2022), parochial altruism (Cadsby et al, 2016;Shalvi & De Dreu, 2014), exposure to dishonest descriptive norms (Gross & De Dreu,, 2020;Soraperra et al, 2017) and conformity (Jamaluddin et al, 2020). Conversely, committing to an honesty oath (Beck et al, 2020;Zickfeld et al, 2023), increasing the salience of negative externalities (Castillo et al, 2022), and being monitored (Mitkidis et al, 2023;Schild et al, 2019) have been found to decrease dishonesty.…”