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Journal ArticleDOI

Bringing Ethics into Focus: How Regulatory Focus and Risk Preferences Influence (Un)ethical Behavior

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TLDR
This paper found that regulatory focus induced by situational cues (such as the framing of a task or incentive schemes) influences people's likelihood to cross ethical boundaries, thus providing evidence for compensatory ethics.
Abstract
In four laboratory studies, we find that regulatory focus induced by situational cues (such as the framing of a task or incentive schemes) influences people’s likelihood to cross ethical boundaries. A promotion focus leads individuals to be more likely to act unethically than a prevention focus (Studies 1, 2, and 3). These higher levels of dishonesty are explained by the influence of a person’s induced regulatory focus on his or her behavior toward risk. A promotion focus leads to risk-seeking behaviors, while a prevention focus leads to risk avoidance (Study 3). Through higher levels of dishonesty, promotion focus also results in higher levels of virtuous behavior (Studies 2 and 3), thus providing evidence for compensatory ethics. Our results also demonstrate that an organization’s framing of ethics influences individuals’ ethical behavior and does so differently depending on an individual’s induced regulatory focus (Study 4).

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Too tired to tell the truth: Self-control resource depletion and dishonesty

TL;DR: The authors found that dishonesty increases when people’s capacity to exert self-control is impaired, and that people may be particularly vulnerable to this effect because they do not predict it.
Journal ArticleDOI

Anxious, threatened, and also unethical: how anxiety makes individuals feel threatened and commit unethical acts.

TL;DR: It is suggested and found that anxiety increases threat perception, which, in turn, results in self-interested unethical behaviors, which is in turn related to experienced threat and unethical behavior.
Journal ArticleDOI

The slippery slope: how small ethical transgressions pave the way for larger future transgressions.

TL;DR: This study extends Bandura's (1991, 1999) social-cognitive theory by demonstrating how the mechanism of moral disengagement can reduce ethicality over a series of gradually increasing indiscretions and finds support for the developed model across 4 multiround studies.

The Truth About Lies: A Meta-Analysis on Dishonest Behavior

TL;DR: This meta-analysis reviews four of the most widely used experimental paradigms: sender–receiver games, die-roll tasks, coin-flip tasks, and matrix tasks and shows that dishonest behavior depends on both situational factors and personal factors, such as the participant’s gender and age.
Journal ArticleDOI

When the cat’s away, some mice will play: A basic trait account of dishonest behavior

TL;DR: In this article, a series of six behavioral experiments were conducted to investigate whether individual differences in dishonest behavior can be accounted for by basic traits in general, and Honesty-Humility in particular.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI

The moderator–mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations.

TL;DR: This article seeks to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ, and delineates the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena.
Book ChapterDOI

Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and develop an alternative model, called prospect theory, in which value is assigned to gains and losses rather than to final assets and in which probabilities are replaced by decision weights.
Journal ArticleDOI

Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach

TL;DR: In fact, some common properties are shared by practically all legislation, and these properties form the subject matter of this essay as discussed by the authors, which is the basis for this essay. But, in spite of such diversity, some commonsense properties are not shared.
Journal ArticleDOI

Mediation in experimental and nonexperimental studies: New procedures and recommendations.

TL;DR: Efron and Tibshirani as discussed by the authors used bootstrap tests to assess mediation, finding that the sampling distribution of the mediated effect is skewed away from 0, and they argued that R. M. Kenny's (1986) recommendation of first testing the X --> Y association for statistical significance should not be a requirement when there is a priori belief that the effect size is small or suppression is a possibility.
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