TY - JOUR
T1 - Dishonest helping and harming after (Un)fair treatment
AU - Leib, Margarita
AU - Moran, Simone
AU - Shalvi, Shaul
N1 - Funding Information:
The study was supported by the European Research Council (RC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement ERC-StG-637915), and by an Israeli Science Foundation grant number 914.14. Copyright: © 2019. The authors license this article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. ∗University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 11, 1018WB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Email: m.leib@uva.nl. †Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. ‡University of Amsterdam. 1Acknowledging that fairness is a relative term - ranging from low to high level of fairness, throughout the paper we refer to less fair treatments as “unfair”, and more fair treatments as “fair”.
Funding Information:
The study was supported by the European Research Council (RC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement ERC-StG-637915), and by an Israeli Science Foundation grant number 914.14.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, the authors.
PY - 2019/1/1
Y1 - 2019/1/1
N2 - People experience fair and unfair treatment daily, and at times may react by breaking ethical rules and lying. Here, we assess the extent to which individuals engage in dishonest behavior aimed at helping or harming others after they experience (un)fair treatment. Across three financially incentivized experiments, recipients in a dictator game received a fair or unfair amount and then could, by means of dishonesty, inflate or deflate their counterparts’ pay. Results show that dishonest helping is a common and robust behavior. Individuals lie to help others after fair, unfair, and no prior treatment. Dishonest harming, however, is less prevalent. Only after unfair treatment, some, but not all, individuals engage in dishonest harming. Dishonest harming was associated with high levels of anger and disappointment, and low levels of gratitude. Interestingly, the source of (un)fairness, whether it is intentional or not, did not attenuate peoples’ behavior, suggesting that dishonest reactions to (un)fairness were driven by the mere (un)fair treatment, and not by a motivation to reciprocate an (un)fair counterpart.
AB - People experience fair and unfair treatment daily, and at times may react by breaking ethical rules and lying. Here, we assess the extent to which individuals engage in dishonest behavior aimed at helping or harming others after they experience (un)fair treatment. Across three financially incentivized experiments, recipients in a dictator game received a fair or unfair amount and then could, by means of dishonesty, inflate or deflate their counterparts’ pay. Results show that dishonest helping is a common and robust behavior. Individuals lie to help others after fair, unfair, and no prior treatment. Dishonest harming, however, is less prevalent. Only after unfair treatment, some, but not all, individuals engage in dishonest harming. Dishonest harming was associated with high levels of anger and disappointment, and low levels of gratitude. Interestingly, the source of (un)fairness, whether it is intentional or not, did not attenuate peoples’ behavior, suggesting that dishonest reactions to (un)fairness were driven by the mere (un)fair treatment, and not by a motivation to reciprocate an (un)fair counterpart.
KW - Behavioral ethics
KW - Decision making
KW - Dishonest behavior
KW - Fairness
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85070707998&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85070707998
VL - 14
SP - 423
EP - 439
JO - Judgment and Decision Making
JF - Judgment and Decision Making
SN - 1930-2975
IS - 4
ER -