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Introduction
You can download all my papers at
exper.psy.rptu.de/hilbig
Publications
Publications (166)
Unethical acts are often witnessed by bystanders who may lie to cover up for the transgressor, thereby helping them avoid sanctions. Here, we investigate the dispositional basis of such unethical loyalty, including the psychological processes involved. Interestingly, as unethical loyalty helps the transgressor, it sets prosociality against honesty—...
Crime is an issue with severe consequences for individuals, economies, and society at large. Developing effective crime prevention strategies requires a clear understanding of who is likely to engage in crime and why. A promising approach in this regard likely is integrating established criminological theories with established models of basic perso...
In light of the growing threat of climate change and urgency of mitigation at the societal and individual level, an exponentially growing body of research has addressed how and what people think about climate change—ranging from basic judgments of truth and attitudes about risk to predictions of future outcomes. However, the field is also beset by...
A fundamental assumption about human behavior forming the backbone of trait theories is that, to some extent, individuals behave consistently across structurally comparable situations. However, especially for unethical behavior, the consistency assumption has been severely questioned, at least from the early 19th century onwards. We provide a stric...
Despite notable progress in the study of dishonest behavior and in particular the identification of personality traits (most notably, Honesty-Humility) that are robust predictors of individual differences in dishonesty, prior research has also left several traits untested or yielded inconsistent or inconclusive findings for other traits. We herein...
Most socially and/or ethically aversive traits from clinical and broad personality research overlap to a large degree. For the latter, however, the association with interpersonal personality dysfunction (IPD) is understudied. Moreover, it is also unclear to what extent the associations of aversive traits with IPD are due to their shared versus uniq...
Faking in self-report personality questionnaires describes a deliberate response distortion aimed at presenting oneself in an overly favorable manner. Unless the influence of faking on item responses is taken into account, faking can harm multiple psychometric properties of a test. In the present article, we account for faking using an extension of...
When self-report personality questionnaires are used in high-stakes assessments, there is the risk that test-takers present themselves in an overly favorable manner, that is, engage in faking. Unless the influence of faking on item responses is taken into account, faking can harm the psychometric properties of a test. In the present research, we ac...
Recent research indicates that children’s motivation for third-party punishment encompasses both retributive and utilitarian considerations. However, the relative weights of different motives and the information used to determine their punishment are yet unclear. In the present research, we address these two questions by analyzing how children seek...
Political orientation reflects beliefs, opinions, and values that are, at least in part, rooted in stable interindividual differences. Whereas evidence has accumulated with regard to the relevance of basic personality dimensions, especially concerning the sociocultural dimension of political ideology, less attention has been paid to the more specif...
Conceptual work integrating constructs from mainstream personality research (especially socalled
“dark” traits) and clinical psychopathology research has been limited. Herein, we propose all
socially and/or ethically aversive traits as “flavored” manifestation of the D-Factor of Personality (D).
We argue that the D-framework provides the commonalit...
The Zeitschrift für Psychologie is the oldest psychological journal in Europe and the second oldest in the world. It was founded in 1890 by Hermann Ebbinghaus, Arthur König, and colleagues 3 years after the American Journal of Psychology and is a publication organ for all fields of empirical psychology. Until 2006, it was published in German. In 20...
Objective: Among basic personality traits, Honesty-Humility yields the most consistent, negative link with dishonest behavior. The theoretical conceptualization of Honesty-Humility, however, suggests a potential boundary condition of this relation, namely, when lying is prosocial. We therefore tested the hypothesis that the association between Hone...
The Dark Triad and Dark Tetrad are the constellation of aversive traits that are most commonly assessed to study their common (aversive) and unique (non-aversive) features. Nonetheless, it is unclear whether these particular traits (in combination) indeed closely approximate the common core of all aversive traits. A close approximation of the avers...
Ethically and socially aversive behaviors have been attributed to several personality traits, including characteristics collectively referred to under the umbrella term of impulsivity. It is an open question, however, whether such characteristics are an integral part of ethically and socially aversive personality. Relying on three large samples (to...
Populism and beliefs in conspiracy theories fuel societal division as both rely on a Manichean us-versus-them, good-versus-evil narrative. However, whether both constructs have the same dispositional roots is essentially unknown. Across three studies conducted in two different countries and using diverse samples (total N = 1,888), we show that popu...
Typically, up to four dark traits, i.e., the dark tetrad, are investigated to explain the dispositional side of aversive relationship behaviors (ARBs). However, the picture across studies is scattered and inconclusive: All dark tetrad traits show similar zero-order relations with ARBs and multiple regressions analyses produced different results reg...
Objective:
There is an ongoing debate in personality research whether the common core of aversive ("dark") traits can be approximated by or even considered equivalent to one of the constructs that have been labeled "Agreeableness". In particular, it has been suggested that the low pole of (what we term) AG+, a broad blend of Big Five Agreeableness...
Individuals differ in how they weigh their own utility versus others'. This tendency codefines the dark factor of personality (D), which is conceptualized as the underlying disposition from which all socially and ethically aversive (dark) traits arise as specific, flavored manifestations. We scrutinize this unique theoretical notion by testing, for...
Objective:
To explain and predict unethical behavior, much attention has been devoted to the "Dark Triad of Personality", a set of three socially aversive personality traits: Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy. Despite its popularity, research on the Dark Triad has been beset by recurring concerns surrounding the distinctiveness of its...
Previous research suggests that individuals prioritize prosocial over pro-environmental motives whenever these motives conflict, that is, when cooperation and pro-environmental behavior are mutually exclusive. As a consequence, framing pro-environmental behavior as beneficial for others—and thus prosocial on a higher level or in the long run—should...
The treatment of student misbehavior is both a major challenge for teachers and a potential source of students’ perceptions of injustice in school. By implication, it is vital to understand teachers’ treatment of student misbehavior vis-à-vis students’ perceptions. One key dimension of punishment behavior reflects the underlying motives and goals o...
Whereas research focusing on stable dispositions has long attributed ethically and socially aversive behavior to an array of aversive (or ‘dark’) traits, other approaches from social-cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have emphasized the crucial role of social norms and situational justifications that allow individuals to uphold a positi...
The past two decades have seen major developments in the study of behavioral (dis)honesty and its measurement as well as a surge of interest in the location of trait honesty within models of basic personality structure and the role of personality traits in behavioral dishonesty more generally. The present review provides an overview of the correspo...
Evolutionary Psychology has considered a Fast Life History Strategy (FLHS), denoting an individual’s tendency to invest more resources in proliferation than in child-rearing, to be responsible for the emergence of aversive traits. Empirical evidence for this notion has been inconsistent, however. Herein, we tested whether FLHS is an adequate repres...
Individual differences in prosocial behavior have been consistently observed in a variety of contexts. Here, we summarize and critically discuss recent developments in two research agendas on the dispositional basis of human prosociality: a personality approach, proposing a variety of trait concepts and corresponding measures to predict prosocial b...
In clinical psychopathology research, up to seven traits have been suggested as instances of antagonistic psychopathology. Those antagonistic traits, in turn, are commonly viewed as reflections of low Agreeableness as per the Big Five (BF‐AG). However, specific theoretical differences between antagonistic traits suggest that other broad and basic d...
The Dark Factor of Personality (D)—the underlying disposition of aversive traits—has been shown to account for various ethically and socially aversive behaviors. Whereas previous findings support the reliability and validity of the original English item sets suggested to measure D, a thorough psychometric examination of their German translation is...
Models of basic personality structure are among the most widely used frameworks in psychology and beyond, and they have considerably advanced the understanding of individual differences in a plethora of consequential outcomes. Over the past decades, two such models have become most widely used: the Five Factor Model (FFM) or Big Five, respectively,...
Recent research suggests that the common core of all aversive traits can be understood through the Dark Factor of Personality (D). Previously, the overlap among aversive traits has also been described as the low pole of HEXACO Honesty-Humility. Relying on longitudinal data and a range of theoretically derived outcome criteria, we test in four studi...
Aversive personality traits have been linked to risk-taking across various domains. Herein, we investigated whether the common core of aversive traits, the Dark Factor of Personality (D), is related to risk-taking. Whereas the conceptualizations of D (common core of aversive traits) and risk-taking (not inherently socially and/or ethically aversive...
Web-based data collection is increasingly popular in both experimental and survey-based research because it is flexible, efficient, and location-independent. While dedicated software for laboratory-based experimentation and online surveys is commonplace, researchers looking to implement experiments in the browser have, heretofore, often had to manu...
Deception of research participants has long been and remains a hot-button issue in the behavioral sciences. At the same time, the field of psychology is fortunate to have an ethics code to rely on in determining whether and how to use and report on deception of participants. Despite ongoing normative controversies, the smallest common denominator a...
Prosocial behaviors constitute vital ingredients for all types of social interactions and relationships as well as for society at large. Corresponding to this significance, the study of prosocial behaviors has received considerable attention across scientific disciplines. A striking feature of this research is that most disciplines rely on economic...
Enduring patterns of socially aversive behavior are ascribed to stable personality disorders (such as narcissistic or antisocial tendencies) in clinical psychology or to so called “dark” traits in personality psychology. As recently shown, the substantial overlap among the latter constructs is attributable to a single underlying disposition, called...
Comparability of measurement across different cultural groups is an essential prerequisite for any cross-cultural assessment. However, cross-cultural measurement invariance is rarely achieved and detecting the source of non-invariance is often challenging. In particular, when different language versions of a measure are administered to different cu...
The deception of research participants remains a controversial issue in the behavioral sciences. Current ethics codes consistently limit the use of deception to cases in which non-deceptive alternatives are unfeasible and, crucially, require that participants subjected to deception be debriefed correspondingly along with an option to withdraw their...
People willingly accept personal costs to sanction norm violations even if they are not personally affected by the wrongdoing and even if their sanctioning yields no immediate benefits—a behavior known as third-party punishment. A notable body of literature suggests that this behavior is primarily driven by retribution (i.e., evening out the harm c...
Unethical behavior is often accompanied by others covering up a transgressor’s actions. We devised a novel behavioral paradigm, the Unethical Loyalty Game, to specifically study individuals’ willingness to lie to cover up others’ dishonesty. Specifically, we examined (i) whether and to what extent individuals are willing to lie to cover up others’...
Objective: Although dark traits as studied in mainstream personality research and socially aversive psychopathology as studied in abnormal psychology intend to account for the same classes of behavior, their degree of conceptual and, consequently, empirical correspondence has remained limited at best. We aim to overcome this divide by demonstrating...
The Dark Factor of Personality (D) is conceptualized as the basic disposition out of which “dark” traits arise as specific manifestations. We herein critically test this conceptualization across nine dark traits in a 4-year longitudinal study with N = 1,261 ( n = 470 at the second measurement occasion, employing full information maximum likelihood...
The HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised (HEXACO-PI-R) has evolved into one of the most heavily applied measurement tools for the assessment of basic personality traits. Correspondingly, the inventory has been translated to several languages for use in cross-cultural research. However, formal tests examining whether the different language versions...
Previous research consistently showed a negative link between Honesty-Humility (HH) and dishonest behavior. However, most prior research neglected the influence of situational factors and their potential interaction with HH. In two incentivized experiments (N = 322, N = 552), we thus tested whether the (subjective) utility of incentives moderates t...
Current literature suggests that laypeople’s punishment is primarily driven by retributive reasons (i.e., to give offender their just deserts) rather than utilitarian purposes such as special prevention (i.e., to prevent recidivism of the offender) or general prevention (i.e., to prevent the imitation of the crime by others). One explanation for th...
The Dark Factor of Personality (D) has been suggested as the basic disposition underlying dark traits, thereby representing their common core. However, it has also been argued that such commonalities reflect the low pole of Agreeableness. The present study (N=729) employed five established inventories to model the Agreeableness construct and consid...
Based on lexical studies, the HEXACO Model of Personality has been proposed as a model of basic personality structure, summarizing individual differences in six broad trait dimensions. Although research across various fields relies on the HEXACO model increasingly, a comprehensive investigation of the nomological net of the HEXACO dimensions is mis...
Fairness can be affected by personality traits, situational factors, and person-situation interactions. Based on studies with adult samples, the present study investigated elementary school children’s (N = 164) social behavior in versions of the Dictator and the Ultimatum Game with actual incentives. Importantly, the Ultimatum, but not the Dictator...
The Dark Factor of Personality (D) is the basic disposition that gives rise to specific personality traits related to antagonistic, malevolent, or socially aversive behavior, thereby representing the common core of dark personality traits. Whereas existing evidence clearly supports the conceptualization and utility of D, the assessment of D was pos...
Lu, Lee, Gino, and Galinsky (2018; LLGG) tested the hypotheses that air pollution causes unethical behavior and that this effect is mediated by increased anxiety. Here, we provide theoretical and empirical arguments against the generality of the effects of air pollution and anxiety on unethical behavior. First, we collected and analyzed monthly lon...
Objective: Across all subfields of psychology, it is common practice to use different indicators of allegedly the same personality constructs, resting upon the (often implicit) assumption that the indicators measure equivalent constructs. However, there is a lack of approaches allowing for a strict and comprehensive test of the equivalence assumpti...
Individuals’ punishment goals depend on the perceived cause of the misbehavior. However, a corresponding attributional model of punishment goals has only been studied in legal domains—but was largely ignored in others, such as the educational domain, in which student misbehavior is a main stressor for both teachers and students. Thus, we investigat...
Psychological accounts of dishonesty propose that lying incurs subjective costs due to threatening individuals’ moral self-image. However, evidence is restricted to indirect tests of such costs, thus limiting strong conclusions about corresponding theories. We present a more direct test of the costs of lying. Specifically, if lying is psychological...
Previous research consistently showed that Openness to Experience is positively linked to pro-environmental behavior. However, this does not appear to hold whenever pro-environmental behavior is mutually exclusive with cooperation. The present study aimed to replicate this null effect of Openness and to test political orientation as explanatory var...
Web-based data collection is increasingly popular in both experimental and survey-based research, because it is flexible, efficient and location-independent. While dedicated software for laboratory-based experimentation and online surveys is commonplace, researchers looking to implement experiments in the browser have, heretofore, often had to manu...
Experimental tasks measure actual behavior when the consequences that follow actions and choices mirror those of real-life behavior. Consequently, choice tasks in consumer research would need to include both costs (losing a previously earned endowment) and gains (actually receiving what was chosen) to structurally resemble real-life consumer choice...
The six dimensions of the HEXACO Model of Personality are most commonly measured via the HEXACO Personality Inventory(-Revised) (HEXACO-PI(-R)), which comes in three versions (60, 100, and 200 items) and is available as a self- and observer report form in several languages. The present study meta-analytically investigates the psychometric propertie...
A recurrent observation in personality judgments is that individuals’ ratings of others’ personalities are positively linked to their self-description, and that such “assumed similarity” effects appear to be trait-specific. However, the extent of and explanations for assumed similarity have been addressed only insufficiently. To close this gap, we...
Low rates of pro-environmental behavior (PEB) in the population have been explained by the declining frequency of experiences in nature due to urbanization and digitalization. Previous research investigated whether increasing salience of nature through virtual nature experiences is suitable to foster PEB, however, the evidence is not fully conclusi...
According to seminal utility-based theories of norm-violating and unethical behavior, the decision to lie involves trading-off the potential benefits of dishonesty against the potential costs if caught. However, even in paradigms with zero risk of sanctions, individuals do not consistently cheat. Still more strikingly, most of the few findings avai...
Previous research has
established that higher levels of trait Honesty-Humility (HH) are associated
with less dishonest behavior in cheating paradigms. However, only imprecise
effect size estimates of this HH-cheating link are available. Moreover,
evidence is inconclusive on whether other basic personality traits from the
HEXACO or Big Five models a...
Many negatively connoted personality traits (often termed “dark traits”) have been introduced to account for ethically, morally, and socially questionable behavior. Herein, we provide a unifying, comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding dark personality in terms of a general dispositional tendency of which dark traits arise as specific...
From the perspective of basic personality models, the HEXACO Honesty-Humility factor has yielded most consistent evidence in accounting for inter-individual variation in prosocial behavior in game-theoretic paradigms. However, both the Honesty-Humility scale and game-theoretic paradigms involve a strong reference to money; thus, the observed link m...
We argue that in addition to the positive effects and functionality of morality for interactions among in-group members as outlined in the target article, morality may also fuel aggression and conflict in interactions between morality-based out-groups. We summarize empirical evidence showing that negative cognitions, emotions, and behaviors are par...
Over the past decades, there has been considerable interest in individual differences in cooperative behaviour and how these can be explained. Whereas the Honesty–Humility dimension from the HEXACO model of personality has been identified as a consistent predictor of cooperation, the underlying motivational mechanisms of this association have remai...
Abstract: Despite convincing counterevidence, misinterpretation of so-called Impression Management, Social Desirability, or Lie scales in low-stakes settings seems to persist. In this reply to an ongoing discussion with Feldman and colleagues (De Vries et al., 2017; Feldman, in press; Feldman et al., 2017), we argue that high scores on Impression M...
Recent developments in personality psychology led to the proposition of two alternative six-factor trait models, the HEXACO model and the Big Six model. However, given the lack of direct comparisons, it is unclear whether the HEXACO and Big Six factors are distinct or essentially equivalent, and whether corresponding inventories measure similar or...
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 pr...
Menschen müssen ständig unterschiedlichste Situationen beurteilen oder Entscheidungen treffen. Dabei können die Informationen mehr oder weniger eindeutig und die Folgen der Entscheidung mehr oder weniger schwerwiegend sein. Die Psychologie erforscht die Struktur von Urteilen und Entscheidungen sowie Einflussfaktoren und Prozesse, die sowohl „gute“...
Most approaches to dishonest behavior emphasize the importance of corresponding payoffs, thus implying that dishonesty might increase with increasing incentives. However, prior evidence does not confirm this intuition. Strikingly, extant findings are based on relatively small payoffs, the potential effects of which are solely analyzed across partic...
Decision strategies explain how people integrate multiple sources of information to make probabilistic inferences. In the past decade, increasingly sophisticated methods have been developed to determine which strategy explains decision behavior best. We extend these efforts to test psychologically more plausible models (i.e., strategies), including...
Under certain circumstances, well-known others (so-called informants) may possess unique insights into targets’ personality traits beyond the targets’ self-views. Specifically, as proposed by the Self-Other Knowledge Asymmetry (SOKA) model, an incremental predictive ability of informants is most likely for traits and corresponding behaviors that ar...
This article shows that the conclusion of Feldman et al.’s (2017) Study 1 that profane individuals tend to be honest is most likely incorrect. We argue that Feldman et al.’s conclusion is based on a commonly held but erroneous assumption that higher scores on Impression Management Scales, such as the Lie Scale, are associated with trait dishonesty....
In previous research, pro-environmental behavior (PEB) was almost exclusively aligned with in-group cooperation. However, PEB and in-group cooperation can also be mutually exclusive or directly conflict. To provide first evidence on behavior in these situations, the present work develops the Greater Good Game (GGG), a social dilemma paradigm with a...
Despite much research on the determinants of trust among strangers, its mechanisms are understood only rudimentarily. Recently, it has been proposed that people trust strangers because they believe they should, thus complying with an injunctive norm even if it conflicts with their preferences. However, given the boldness of this claim and in light...
According to the recognition-heuristic theory, decision makers solve paired comparisons in which one object is recognized and the other not by recognition alone, inferring that recognized objects have higher criterion values than unrecognized ones. However, success-and thus usefulness-of this heuristic depends on the validity of recognition as a cu...