BEHAV-ETHICS · From cooperation to dishonesty: How concern for others can lead to unethical behavior

From cooperation to dishonesty: How concern for others can lead to unethical behavior

Cooperation with others is common and beneficial in organizational as well as personal settings. Working together allows people to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes and prosper. While the benefits of experiencing cooperation are clear, recent work suggests that when people work together (rather than alone) they are more likely to engage in dishonest acts aimed at boosting their profit, apparently because it is easier to justify lying when others share the profit. It thus seems plausible that experiencing cooperation from counterparts may increase people’s likelihood to reciprocate, even when reciprocation requires bending ethical rules. The main aim of the proposed research is to explore whether, and how, experiencing cooperation increases people’s concerns regarding their counterparts’ outcomes, and thus encourages bending ethical rules in order to profit the cooperating others. Such dishonest reciprocation, may not only allow one to display care about the other’s outcome, but also increase the likelihood of future cooperation, potentially leading to a slippery-slope spiral of unethical misconduct. We began testing the model systematically by employing experimental social psychological and behavioral economic paradigms. During the first period of the project, we focused on addressing objectives 1 and 2. First, building on the pilot data presented in the proposal, we published results demonstrating that when people bond together (experimentally induced by asking them to inhale a social bonding hormone called oxytocin), they lie more to benefit their group compare to people who do not bond together (placebo condition; Shalvi & De Dreu, 2014, PNAS). Beyond this work, we have uncovered that when people are placed in a situation in which they have to work together, and (unethically) reciprocate each other's rule violations, they tend to lie most when all related parties equally share the profits from the dishonest acts (Weisel & Shalvi, 2015, PNAS). The latter working paper revealed that the mechanism for reciprocating unethical behavior is the feeling of equally sharing the profits gained, rather than benefiting one party more than the other. Along with its theoretical contributions, we believe that our research program has important practical implications for the public. In particular, understanding when people are most likely to engage in ethical rule violations triggered by other's cooperative acts.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union