Between me and we: The importance of self-profit versus social justifiability for ethical decision making

Abstract

Abstract Current theories of dishonest behavior suggest that both individual profits and the availability of justifications drive cheating. Although some evidence hints that cheating behavior is most prevalent when both self-profit and social justifications are present, the relative impact of each of these factors is insufficiently understood. This study provides a fine-grained analysis of the trade-off between self-profit versus social justifiability. In a non-student online sample, we assessed dishonest behavior in a coin-tossing task, involving six conditions which systematically varied both self-profit and social justifiability (in terms of social welfare), such that a decrease in the former was associated with the exact same increase in the latter. Results showed that self-profit outweighed social justifiability, but that there was also an effect of social justifications.