What Provides Justification for Cheating—Producing or Observing Counterfactuals?

Abstract

When people can profit financially by lying, they do so to the extent to which they can justify their lies. One type of justification is the observation and production of desirable counterfactual information. Here, we disentangle observing and producing of desired counterfactuals and test whether the mere observation is sufficient or whether one actually needs to produce the information in order to justify lying. By employing a modified version of the Die‐Under‐Cup task, we ask participants to privately roll a die three times and to report the outcome of the first die roll (with higher values corresponding to higher payoffs). In all three conditions, participants produce (roll the die) and observe the first die roll, which is relevant for pay. We manipulate whether participants produce and observe versus only observe the second and third die roll outcomes, which are both irrelevant for pay. Results reveal that people lie to the same extent—when producing and observing the counterfactuals, and when merely observing them. It seems that merely observing counterfactual information is sufficient to allow people to use this information to justify their lies. We further test whether creativity and moral disengagement are associated with dishonesty and replicate the finding showing that unethical behavior increases with creativity. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Honest mistake or perhaps not: The role of descriptive and injunctive norms on the magnitude of dishonesty

“…This process may lead even honest people to engage in minor dishonesty and at the same time remain unaware (i.e., ethically blind) of the moral repercussions of their actions (Banaji, Bazerman, & Chugh, 2003; Palazzo, Krings, & Hoffrage, 2012). On the other hand, the self‐concept maintenance theory postulates that ambiguous contexts drive attention toward tempting information and provide flexible self‐serving justifications for misbehaving especially when one engages in minor dishonesty (Bassarak et al, 2017; Mazar, Amir, & Ariely, 2008; Pittarello, Leib, Gordon‐Hecker, & Shalvi, 2015; Shalvi, Gino, Barkan, & Ayal, 2015). These theories provide plausible explanations for minor dishonesty and emphasize the importance of ambiguity (Dana, Weber, & Kuang, 2007).…”

Cheating: One common morality for gains and losses but two components of morality itself

“…Of course, this does not mean that a pure economic approach is incorrect: All the traditionally considered aspects of decisions (such as temptation, possibility of inspection, and magnitude of a possible penalty) matter (as we also showed in our study), but they simply interfere with moral considerations. Depending on situational (Bassarak et al, 2017;Shalvi et al, 2015) or individual characteristics (Hilbig & Thielmann, 2017), these moral considerations can simply matter more or less at any particular moment.…”

Moral organizational creativity: Exploring ethical antecedents for a new construct

“…To foster creativity often involves rule‐breaking and avoiding norms (Baucus et al, ). Moreover, creativity as a strategy can involve individuals to disconnect from the situation and morally disengage (Bassarak et al, ).…”

“…Moral organizational creativity can be achieved through the initiation of moral imagination within the context of particular types of ethical work climates. Creativity is enhanced not only by individual characteristics, but also organizational‐level factors (Bassarak et al, ). Next, we introduce the individual‐level factor, moral imagination.…”

“…The connection between creativity and ethics has been debated (e.g. Bassarak et al, ; Baucus, Norton, Baucus, & Human, ; Gino & Ariely, ; Schumacher & Wasieleski, ), however, often without providing conceptual solutions on how they can be interrelated. Baucus et al () highlights that there is a lack of attention to ethical issues and questions within the creativity literature.…”