Why Good People Sometimes Do Bad Things: Motivated Reasoning and Unethical Behavior

The hypothesis that unethical behavior is promoted when people are able to develop and maintain a biased characterization of an unethical action as being morally acceptable was tested in an experiment in which 120 participants were overpaid for taking part in a study. The variable of interest—whether the participants pointed out the overpayment—was examined in a between-participants design under three sets of contrasting manipulations designed to affect differentially participants’ abilities to convince themselves that keeping the over payment was acceptable. Logistic regressions revealed a decrease in unethical behavior when participants’ abilities to construct neutralizations for keeping the overpayment were impeded. A follow-up study indicated that these results were unlikely to have been a consequence of changes in the ethicality of keeping the money as a function of the specific experimental manipulations used. The influence of moral attitudes and gender on moral behavior was also examined. Moral attitude measures were not predictive, but males were more likely to act unethically.