No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
Deception as competence: The effect of occupational stereotypes on the perception and proliferation of deception
Abstract
Deception is common but widely condemned. The current research examines why. Integrating theories of selling, stereotypes, and negotiation—and challenging much research and rhetoric on deception—we document that perceivers do not always disapprove of deceivers. Instead, they conclude that deceivers will be competent in certain occupations: those in which a selling orientation (SO) is stereotypically seen as integral to the job. We first introduce SO as an occupational stereotype and distinguish between occupations stereotyped as high vs. low in SO (HISO vs. LISO). We then demonstrate (across six studies; two preregistered; total N = 1584) that deception is perceived to signal a person's ability to engage in SO, and thus their competence in HISO occupations. Finally, we show that this perception may lead to the hiring of deceptive individuals. These results identify occupations as a moderator of deception-related reactions, helping to explain persistent deception and highlight possible interventions.
... Podsakoff et al. (2011), for example, found that interviewers tend to evaluate job candidates who display helping behavior, a facet of morality, more positively and are more likely to hire them compared to job candidates who do not display such behaviors. Indeed, the importance of morality as a factor in selection decisions has been demonstrated in both general (e.g., Kim, 2019) and occupation-specific contexts (Gunia & Levine, 2019). Overall, the behavioral manifestations of moral job candidates (e.g., being fair, honesty, etc.) should be attractive to jobs within most industries, leading to high perceived P-E fit and in turn ratings of hireability from the interviewers' perspectives. ...
... To the extent that morality is viewed as an aspect of both the job candidate and the industry, a question of fit can factor into the interviewer's decision-making. Indeed, Gunia and Levine (2019) provided evidence that signals of immorality can improve ratings of hireability for jobs associated with a high-selling orientation. Consistent with their perspective, we suggest that signals of morality are assessed against broad perceptions of the moral taint of the industry in which the job exists. ...
... In other words, we suggest that a job candidate who displays a willingness to engage in immoral behaviors might therefore be considered more hirable because he/she signals to the interviewer an ability to execute some of the on-the-job unethical behaviors that the morally tainted industries might necessitate (e.g., lying to a customer about the health effects of smoking). Gunia and Levine (2019) demonstrated that signals of morality can impact ratings of hireability into a particular job (i.e., sales), and we further suggest that signals of immorality might similarly indicate a fit with the morally tainted industry. To examine this possibility, we posit the following hypothesis: ...
In this research we challenge the belief that positive signals of morality always increase job candidates’ appeal to interviewers. In four experiments with both experienced and novice interviewers, we find that signals of the candidates’ morality interact with the nature of the industry such that candidates who send signals of morality are less likely to be selected for jobs in a morally‐tainted industry, compared to neutral candidates. Moderated mediation analyses indicate that this effect is driven by a perceived lack of job fit (Experiments 1 and 2). Results of Experiment 3 indicate that this moderation effect is limited to candidates who signal morality—candidates applying for jobs in morally‐tainted industries who signal immorality do not enjoy a competitive advantage over moral or morally‐neutral candidates. Finally, the framing of the organization, i.e., whether critical aspects of the organization are presented as more morally‐ or economically‐oriented, within morally‐tainted industries helps mitigate the penalizing effects interviewers put on candidates who signal their morality – a moral frame eliminates this negative effect whereas an economic frame does not (Experiment 4). Together, these studies indicate that a job candidate's morality is a complicated and important quality that can profoundly affect his/her ratings of hireability.
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
... We used a hiring task adapted from Gunia and Levine (2019). When participants entered the study, they learned that they were assigned to the role of manager and that they would have the opportunity to hire a former participant (the employee) to complete a workplace task. ...
... That is, individuals do not necessarily view lies about one's feelings as prosocial lies (Levine & Schweitzer, 2014. Emotional misrepresentation uniquely signals competence, a consequence of deception that has thus far received very little attention (for an exception, see Gunia & Levine, 2019). Thus, this research unearths new consequences of deception and expands our taxonomy of lies. ...
Individuals who experience personal distress face a dilemma when they enter the workplace: should they authentically express their negative emotions when conversing with colleagues, or feign happiness? Across six experiments, using face-to-face interactions, as well as video and scenario-based stimuli, we explore how feigning happiness in the face of personal hardship affects trust among colleagues. We find that individuals who feign happiness in professional contexts are more likely to be hired and are trusted more by others, despite also being perceived as more dishonest. Our results suggest that these trust benefits are unique to professional (rather than personal) contexts, and are driven by perceptions of resilience, rather than conformity to display rules. This research deepens our understanding of emotion regulation, authenticity, and trust by exploring the consequences of feigned happiness in mixed motive settings and by demonstrating that emotional misrepresentation, unlike many other forms of misrepresentation, can increase trust.
... Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5082852 1 motivations (Kish-Gephart et al., 2010;Park et al., 2022). Teams may opt for dishonest or deceptive members if they stand to benefit from the members' behavior without bearing any of its costs, e.g., in high-pressure sales environments, such as PR and financial services or real estate, managers or employees may knowingly turn a blind eye to a colleague's dishonest behavior when they know their company stands to gain from it (Gunia & Levine, 2019;Yam et al., 2021). Political parties, or lobbying firms might recruit individuals with insider knowledge or a track record of successful but ethically dubious conduct, particularly when the costs fall on taxpayers or external stakeholders rather than the hiring entity (Blanes i Vidal et al., 2012). ...
Organizations usually seek employees who will not harm them by their dishonest behavior. However, in certain situations, companies can benefit from the dishonesty of their employees at the expense of their customers, competitors, or the public. To systematically examine how individuals reward or punish dishonest behavior of the members of their group, we conducted a study measuring the preference for dishonest behavior that impacts the group or third parties. In a laboratory experiment, participants played an incentivized prediction task in two versions, in one of which they could cheat to increase their reward. Participants were divided into groups of four and voted on which participant should play the cheating-enabling version of the task using information about their reward in a previous round of the task. Participants voted for cheaters less when the costs of cheating had a negative impact either on them or on a charity (representing social impact) than when cheating did not have an identifiable victim. However, they voted for cheaters more when the reward from cheating was divided among all group members. Even otherwise honest participants tended to vote for dishonest group members when they benefited from their cheating.
... A substantial and growing literature has used experiments to investigate ethical decision making. This work has advanced our understanding of how economic incentives (Tenbrunsel, 1998;Warren & Schweitzer, 2018), available justifications (Barkan, Ayal, 4 & Ariely, 2015;Wiltermuth, 2011), and cultural norms (Gunia & Levine, 2019;Soraperra et al., 2017) impact ethical behavior. Reflecting the magnitude of this literature, two recent meta-analyses reviewed studies that included nearly 45,000 participants . ...
Unethical behavior in organizations is pervasive. The social and economic consequences of unethical behavior are profound, and a large body of work in economics, psychology, and management has been dedicated to investigating organizational misconduct. Despite increased scholarly interest, there has been a strong methodological convergence in behavioral ethics experiments that has narrowed the scope of ethical decision-making research. In this dissertation, I use novel experimental methods to advance the study of ethical decision making both theoretically and methodologically. In Chapters 1 & 2, I highlight the limits of financially incentivized behavior and demonstrate how fear of shame and fear of embarrassment guide ethical judgment. In Chapter 1, I show that people will lie and sacrifice financial gain to avoid being embarrassed in front of others. In Chapter 2, I show that people can learn appropriate behavior from others’ expressions of shame. I find that people will avoid the behavior that elicits shame in others even when paid to engage in that behavior and when the norms surrounding that behavior are otherwise ambiguous. In Chapter 3, I draw the conceptual distinction between cheating behavior and lying behavior. While prior work has considered the terms interchangeable, by identifying the two behaviors as distinct, I reconcile conflicting findings in behavioral ethics. Together, this dissertation highlights the limitations of extant approaches and expands our understanding of ethical decision making.
... For another, since strengths-based HR system is able to stimulate employee strengths use, employees with higher levels of perception of strengths-based HR system may have mastery experience (Bakker & van Woerkom, 2018) and be more competent in their job positions (Dubreuil et al., 2014). There was evidence demonstrating that employees with greater competence are more likely to seek and grasp opportunities to execute unethical behavior (Gunia & Levine, 2019). Based on the above arguments, we proposed the following hypothesis: ...
Although strengths-based approaches in the workplace are able to bring out various positive outcomes, relatively little research has considered the dark sides of strengths-based approaches in the workplace. This study sought to examine whether perceived strengths-based human resource (HR) system as a specific form of strengths-based approaches is able to stimulate employees to execute unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB) and considered the mediating role of organizational identification in the relationship. Data with a sample of 210 employees from various organizations in China were collected at three points in time. Structural equation modelling analysis was deployed to test our hypotheses. The authors found that perceived strengths-based HR system spurs UPB, and organizational identification acts as a mediator in the relationship between perceived strengths-based HR system and UPB. This study extends previous literature on strengths-based approaches in the workplace by considering its dark side and advances HR system and UPB theories and research.
... For instance, veterans are more likely to be matched to jobs described as "handson" and with little contact with the public because veterans are often stereotyped as being more competent in planning and acting, but less social and less empathic, compared to nonveterans (Shepherd et al., 2019). Interestingly, recruiters may also preferentially hire candidates that they perceive as dishonest or manipulative for jobs in which deception is considered an important skill, such as a salesperson (Gunia & Levine, 2019). ...
Personality inferences are fundamental to human social interactions and have far-reaching effects on various social decisions. Fourteen experiments (13 preregistered; total N = 5160; using audio, video, and text stimuli) involving British, U.S. American, Singaporean, and Australian participants show that people responding to a question immediately (vs. after a slight pause) are seen as more extraverted. This is because response delays are believed to signal nervousness and passivity, and hence introversion. This effect was consistently observed across a range of scenarios from everyday small-talk to mock job interviews, and for various types of response formats, including face-to-face, phone, and online conversations. We found that the effect was not influenced by apparent relationship closeness between the responder and questioner, but that it was influenced by whether observers believed that the responder was mentally occupied during the interaction. Importantly, our results also suggest that the effect of response timing on extraversion perceptions influences hiring decisions – job applicants are more likely to be hired by mock employers for job types congruent with their level of extraversion as exuded from their response timing. Finally, we found that observers typically expect that introverted individuals would pause for longer before responding to questions, as compared to extraverted individuals. Theoretical implications for the understanding of personality impression formation and response timing and practical implications for hiring and other interpersonal situations are discussed.
Keywords: response timing, perceived extraversion, impression formation, personality inferences, response delay
... There is also evidence that people believe such individuals exist, and hence that information about unethical behavior does not always translate in a direct way to information about competence (Kim and Zuckerman Sivan, 2017). For example, people believe that careers characterized by a "selling orientation" require a certain amount of unethical behavior; and, accordingly, receiving information that a person in such a career behaves more deviantly actually leads to higher ratings of their competence (Gunia and Levine, 2019). ...
Purpose
Using the stereotype content model (SCM) as a framework, the authors examine how the negative relationship between peoples’ unethical behavior and perceptions of their competence only holds when the unethical act is simple.
Design/methodology/approach
In two studies, participants ( n = 401) evaluated the competence of an employee who behaved unethically. In one condition, the unethical behavior was complex (e.g. computer hacking), while in the other it was simple (e.g. stealing items from a closet).
Findings
Our findings are built on prior work by showing that employees are considered significantly more competent when their unethical behavior is complex as opposed to simple (“evil genius” effect).
Practical implications
Employees may not be discouraged from engaging in complex unethical behavior if they recognize that it might not affect their reputation as a competent employee. Given the negative impact of unethical behavior, this is a consequence that organizations would likely seek to avoid.
Originality/value
The authors expand on the SCM by making a clear distinction between how certain behaviors (unethical and complex) influence trait perceptions (warmth and competence). In doing so, the authors identify a moderator – act complexity – that weakens the negative relationship between individuals’ unethical behavior and perceptions of their competence.
... Imhoff et al., 2018). Occupations are, therefore, relevant social categories upon which people base their assessment of frontline employees (Gunia and Levine, 2019;Pinar et al., 2017), and they can also serve as managerially actionable categories of frontline employees. ...
Purpose
Longitudinal studies have shown that consumer satisfaction has increased over the last 15 years, whereas trust and loyalty have decreased during the same period. This finding contradicts the trust–value–loyalty model (TVLM), which posits that higher satisfaction increases consumers' trust, value and loyalty levels. To explain this counterintuitive trend, this study draws on models of trust formation to integrate the stereotype content model and the TVLM. It argues that consumers' occupational and industry stereotypes influence their trust, value and loyalty judgments through their trusting beliefs regarding frontline employees and management practices/policies.
Design/methodology/approach
The study was conducted among 476 consumers who were randomly assigned to one of five service industries (apparel retail, airlines, hotels, health insurance or telecommunications services) and asked to rate their current service provider from that industry.
Findings
The results suggest that both occupational and industry stereotypes influence consumers' trusting beliefs and trust judgments, although only the effects of industry stereotypes are transferred to consumers' loyalty judgments.
Research limitations/implications
The results of the study indicate that industry stereotypes have become increasingly negative over the last decades, which has a dampening effect on the positive effects of satisfaction.
Practical implications
This study provides guidelines for practitioners regarding the management of frontline employees and the development of consumer trust, value and loyalty.
Originality/value
This is the first study to propose and test an explanation for the counterintuitive trend concerning customer satisfaction, trust and loyalty. It is also the first to examine the roles of multiple stereotypes in the relationship between consumers and service providers.
... Similarly, Cialdini, Li, Samper and Wellman (2019) found that exposure to unethical leader behavior increased honest team members' likelihood of choosing to leave the team. On the other hand, individuals who engage in deception prefer to join occupations in advertising, banking, or sales (Gunia & Levine, 2019). Individuals in real-life cheating-enabling environments are therefore likely to be different from other people due to self-selection. ...
Does the choice of an environment where cheating is possible lead to its escalation? We analyzed behavior of employees (N = 284) hired to perform a task online. In the manual reporting (MR), employees could overreport the number of hours worked. In the automatic reporting (AR), the hours were counted automatically, making cheating impossible. Two-thirds of the participants were given a chance to choose the reporting scheme, the rest were assigned to the MR directly. As the actual time spent on the task was tracked in all conditions, we were able to assess the degree of overreporting by employees in MR. Although we found that people in MR slightly overreported the hours worked, employees who chose MR did not overreport their hours more than those assigned to MR at random. Moreover, participants lower in honesty-humility were not more likely to choose MR; only those higher in emotionality were. The results show that even when enabled to cheat, online workers reported their hours worked honestly and the possibility for cheaters to select cheating enabling environments may not always lead to an increase of dishonesty in organizations.
... In general, stereotypes are "widely held assumptions about certain types of people that are represented cognitively as extensive, wellorganized categories or schemata" (Andersen, Klatzky, & Murray, 1990;Gunia & Levine, 2019). While stereotypes allow for a quick and intuitive assessment of other individuals and groups, they can also cause distorted judgement and biased behaviour (Bordalo, Coffman, Gennaioli, & Shleifer, 2016). ...
Transgressions committed by employees of non-profit (vs. of for-profit) organizations seem to be judged more harshly by the public. This research studies the underlying process of this relationship. We show that organizational stereotypes of morality and warmth “rub-off” from organizations to individuals affiliated with them (Study 1, N = 297). We show that stereotypes of morality and warmth predict expected communal sharing and market pricing behaviour. (Study 2, N = 300). Next, we identify downstream effects of this stereotype rub-off effect in case of transgressions. We show that communal sharing expectations elicit greater perceived expectancy violation and consequently higher punishment when employees commit transgressions (Study 3, N = 402). In sum, as a result of high perceived morality and warmth and subsequent expectations of communal sharing, transgressions of employees affiliated with non-profit organizations prompt increased expectancy violation in observers, leading to harsher punishment. Our findings have important implications for public relations management of non-profit organizations.
... Similarly, Cialdini et al., (2019) found that exposure to unethical leader behavior increased team members' likelihood of choosing to leave the team. On the other hand, individuals who engage in deception prefer to join occupations in advertising, banking, or sales (Gunia & Levine, 2019). The same dynamics were shown also in laboratory experiments (Brassiolo et al., 2020;Gino et al., 2013;Houdek et al., 2020) in which participants more willing to cheat were in fact attracted to cheatingenabling environments. ...
Does the choice of an environment where cheating is possible lead to its escalation? We analyzed behavior of employees (N = 284) hired to perform a task online. In the manual reporting (MR), employees could overreport the number of hours worked. In the automatic reporting (AR), the hours were counted automatically, making cheating impossible. Two-thirds of the participants were given a chance to choose the reporting scheme, the rest were assigned to the MR directly. Although we found that people in MR slightly overreported the hours worked, employees who chose MR did not overreport their hours more than those assigned to MR at random. Moreover, participants lower in honesty-humility were not more likely to choose MR; only those higher in emotionality were. The results show that even when enabled to cheat, online workers reported their hours worked honestly and the possibility for cheaters to select cheating enabling environments may not always lead to an increase of dishonesty in organizations.
... In general, stereotypes are "widely held assumptions about certain types of people that are represented cognitively as extensive, wellorganized categories or schemata" (Andersen, Klatzky, & Murray, 1990;Gunia & Levine, 2019). While stereotypes allow for a quick and intuitive assessment of other individuals and groups, they can also cause distorted judgement and biased behaviour (Bordalo, Coffman, Gennaioli, & Shleifer, 2016). ...
Why does the public react more sharply to transgressions of non-profit employees than for-profit employees? In this paper we propose and show that employees are stereotyped differently depending on their organizational affiliation to for-profit organizations, which stereotypically perceived as competent, or non-profit organizations, which are stereotypically perceived as moral. Results show that employees affiliated with non-profit organizations are stereotyped as significantly more moral, sociable, communal, positively valent and correct than employees affiliated with for-profit organizations (Study 1a & 1b). We show that as a result of this this so called “stereotype rub-off effect” observers of transgressions will experience greater expectancy violation when transgressions are committed by employees affiliated with non-profit organizations compared to employees affiliated with for-profit organizations (Study 2). We qualitatively identify trust and perceived hypocrisy as cognitive, and avoidance and gossiping as behavioural reactions to increased expectancy violation (Study 3). We then show that observers of transgressions trust transgressors less, perceive them as more hypocritical (cognitive reactions), leading to avoidance and gossiping about the transgressor (Study 4). Unbeknownst to themselves or the organization they affiliate with, employees of non-profit organizations are held to higher moral standards which affects public response to transgressions negatively.
We investigate perceptions of emotional deception and introduce a novel distinction between the Up-display of emotion (the fabricated and the exaggerated expression of emotions) and the Down-display of emotion (the suppression of felt emotions). Observers judge Down-displays of anger, sadness, and happiness as more ethical (less deceptive, less intentional, and less harmful) than commensurate Up-displays. We integrate these findings to build a unifying framework of perceptions of deception, the Deception Perception Model, to assert that perceptions of deception are influenced by Perceived Deception Intention, Deception Magnitude, Consequences of Deception, Contextual Norms of Deception, and Deception Discovery.
Deception scholarship has focused on deceivers and has largely conceptualized targets as passive victims. We integrate the articles in this special issue, along with a broad body of literature on deception, moral judgment, and blame, to introduce the Shared Responsibility Model of deception (SR Model). The SR Model conceptualizes deception as a social process to describe how both communicators and targets are responsible for deception. Observers’ perception of the targets’ responsibility is a function of (1) whether targets should have expected deception, (2) whether targets took preventive actions, (3) targets’ inferred motives, and (4) targets’ characteristics. The SR Model also challenges the implicit assumption that as communicators’ responsibility for deception increases, targets’ responsibility decreases. The SR Model has important implications for research on ethics, communication, and behavioral decision making.
Prior research on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has documented how specific CSR activities relate to responses of relevant stakeholders, mainly examining employees. However, it is as yet unclear whether these findings generalize to other types of CSR activities or to responses of other stakeholder groups. In fact, results from studies to date also show inconsistent effects in need of further explanation.
In this contribution we offer a new perspective on this literature. We extend current insights on organizational CSR activities and stakeholder support, by elaborating on the psychological mechanisms that can explain these relations. We draw together recent developments on organizational anthropomorphism with insights on organizational identification, to argue that the impact of CSR activities on a broad range of stakeholder responses depends on perceptions of organizational morality. We connect prior work on organizational ethics, CSR, and stakeholder support, to social psychological theory and research on impression formation, impression management, and impression updating. This new perspective allows us to broaden the current debate on CSR and stakeholder support.
Building on this analysis, we propose a new model that offers a roadmap for future research. We explain the impact of organizational CSR on stakeholder responses, by highlighting perceived organizational morality as a key mediating variable. We then proceed to consider likely moderators of this relation distinguishing between (a) characteristics of the organization, (b) characteristics of (communications about) CSR activities, and (c) characteristics of the perceivers. On the basis of this extended model we develop specific predictions, and review initial evidence supporting these prediction.
We review the evidence linking gender to dishonesty and conclude that men are often more dishonest than women, especially in competitive settings where lies advance self-interest. However, gender differences in dishonesty are often small and mutable across situations. We propose that attending to self-regulatory constructs such as moral identity might help researchers move beyond the evolutionary-cultural debates over the origin of gender differences toward identifying factors that promote honesty from both genders.
Deception pervades negotiations and shapes both the negotiation process and outcomes. In this article, we review recent scholarship investigating deception in negotiations. We offer an integrative review of recent theoretical and empirical research, and we argue that the dominant experimental paradigms that scholars have used to study deception have limited our understanding of deception in negotiation. We call for future work to develop new paradigms to investigate the role of relationships, reputations, emotions, and negotiation experience. We also call for future work to expand our understanding of practical prescriptions to curtail a negotiator’s risk of being deceived.
Professional choices influence valued outcomes such as income, life satisfaction, and social status. However, public opinion polls consistently illustrate that an individual's profession also influences how honest one is perceived to be, and people are motivated to see themselves as honest for many reasons. Why would people choose professions that do not confer them with the benefits of honesty? Survey data reveals honesty perceptions to positively correlate with a profession's conferred prestige (i.e., perceived value to society) and negatively correlate with a profession's annual income. The tradeoff between income and honesty perceptions suggests a wage differential mechanism-employees may maintain a positive self-concept through increased income which compensates for costs incurred by working in a profession characterized by low honesty.
Unhealthy sleep is a modern epidemic, and recent research has linked it to unethical behaviors like deception. Yet, scholars are also starting to examine factors that could curtail unhealthy sleep and its consequences. The current paper reviews evidence that indirectly implies or directly documents a relationship between unhealthy sleep and deception, detailing critical mediators and moderators. It concludes with a discussion of the many intriguing research avenues arising from this nascent literature, each with eminent relevance in a sleep-deprived world.
I argue that lying in business negotiations is pro tanto wrong and no less wrong than lying in other contexts. First, I assert that lying in general is pro tanto wrong. Then, I examine and refute five arguments to the effect that lying in a business context is less wrong than lying in other contexts. The common thought behind these arguments—based on consent, self-defence, the “greater good,” fiduciary duty, and practicality—is that the particular circumstances which are characteristic of business negotiations are such that the wrongness of lying is either mitigated or eliminated completely. I argue that all these “special exemption” arguments fail. I conclude that, in the absence of a credible argument to the contrary, the same moral constraints must apply to lying in business negotiations as apply to lying in other contexts. Furthermore, I show that for the negotiator, there are real practical benefits from not lying.
Research on guilt proneness in the workplace has flourished over the past decade. Here we attempt to refine the construct, outlining its positive psychological mechanisms and clarifying how it relates to desired employee outcomes. We present a theoretical framework that explains how guilt-prone employees react and attempt to resolve, conflicting normative expectations, generating specific predictions about the relationship between guilt proneness and various forms of conformity and deviance. Specifically, we posit that guilt proneness relates positively to constructive conformity (e.g., high motivation and job performance) and negatively to destructive deviance (e.g., counterproductive work behavior) when employees perceive alignment between moral and organizational norms. If misalignment exists, and employees believe they can reconcile this misalignment, guilt proneness spurs constructive deviance in the form of dissent, voicing, and whistleblowing. When realignment appears unlikely, higher guilt-prone employees will choose to leave the organization rather than support its objectionable acts (i.e., avoiding destructive conformity). Overall, we offer a new perspective on the function of guilt proneness at work—conceptualizing guilt proneness as a source of motivation to adhere to organizational norms and to change these norms to align with moral ideals.
Automated detection of text with misrepresentations such as fake reviews is an important task for online reputation management. We form the Ultimate Deception Dataset that consists of customer complaints—emotionally charged texts, which include descriptions of problems customers experienced with certain businesses. Typically, in customer complaints, either customer describes company representative lying, or they lie themselves. The Ultimate Deception Dataset includes almost 3 000 complaints in the personal finance domain and provides clear ground truth based on available factual knowledge about the financial domain. Among them, four hundred texts were manually tagged. Experiments were performed in order to explore the links between implicit cues of the rhetoric structure of texts and the validity of arguments, and also how truthful/deceptive are these texts. We confirmed that communicative discourse trees are essential to detect various forms of misrepresentation in text, achieving 76% F1 on the Ultimate Deception Dataset. We believe that this accuracy is sufficient to assist a manual curation of a CRM environment towards having high-quality, trusted content. Recognizing hypocrisy in customer communication concerning his impression with the company or hypocrisy in customer attitude is fairly important for proper tackling and retaining customers. We collect a dataset of sentences with hypocrisy and learn to detect it relying on syntactic, semantic and discourse-level features and also web mining to correlate contrasting entities. The sources are customer complaints, samples of texts with hypocrisy on the web and tweets tagged as hypocritical. We propose an iterative procedure to grow the training dataset and achieve the detection F1 above 80%, which is expected to be satisfactory for integration into a CRM platform. We conclude this section with the detection of a rumor and misinformation in web document where discourse analysis is also helpful.
The analysis carried out by the authors captures the ambivalent (dual) approach to the phenomenon of lies, both on the part of society and in the scientific community. In most studies, however, the phenomenon of lies is seen as the most important social competence necessary for successful adaptation in society. As part of the same ambivalent approach, it is found that creativity directly correlates with the phenomenon of lies. Analysis of the phenomenon of lies within the framework of age development showed that lies are positively associated with the development of cognitive and regulatory capabilities of the child. From this point of view, the early manifestations of deception in children are considered to be quite positive.
Manipulative strategies of social conduct (Machiavellianism) have been studied by both psychologists and evolutionary biologists. The authors use the psychological literature as a database to test evolutionary hypotheses about the adaptive advantages of manipulative social behavior. Machiavellianism does not correlate with general intelligence and does not consistently lead to real-world success. It is best regarded as 1 of several social strategies, broadly similar to the “defect” strategy of evolutionary game theory, which is successful in some situations but not others. In general, human evolutionary psychology and evolutionary game theory provide useful frameworks for thinking about behavioral strategies, such as Machiavellianism, and identify a large number of specific hypotheses that have not yet been tested by personality and social psychologists.
While moral character heavily influences global evaluations of others (Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014), its causal effect on perceptions of others’ competence (i.e., one’s knowledge, skills, and abilities) is less clear. We found that people readily use information about another’s morality when judging their competence, despite holding folk intuitions that these domains are independent. Across 6 studies (n = 1,567), including 2 preregistered experiments, participants judged targets who committed hypothetical transgressions (Studies 1 and 3), cheated on lab tasks (Study 2), acted selfishly in economic games (Study 4), and received low morality ratings from coworkers (Study 5 and 6) as less competent than control or moral targets. These findings were specific to morality and were not the result of incidentally manipulating impressions of warmth (Study 4), nor were they fully explained by a general halo effect (Studies 2 and 3). We hypothesized that immoral targets are seen as less competent because their immoral actions led them to be viewed as low in social intelligence. Studies 4 and 5 supported this prediction, demonstrating that social intelligence was a more reliable mediator than perceptions of self-control or general intelligence. An experimental test of this mediation argument found that presenting targets as highly socially intelligent eliminated the negative effect of immoral information on judgments of competence (Study 6). These results suggest that information about a person’s moral character readily influences perceptions of their competence.
Researchers interested in testing mediation often use designs where participants are measured on a dependent variable Y and a mediator M in both of 2 different circumstances. The dominant approach to assessing mediation in such a design, proposed by Judd, Kenny, and McClelland (2001), relies on a series of hypothesis tests about components of the mediation model and is not based on an estimate of or formal inference about the indirect effect. In this article we recast Judd et al.'s approach in the path-analytic framework that is now commonly used in between-participant mediation analysis. By so doing, it is apparent how to estimate the indirect effect of a within-participant manipulation on some outcome through a mediator as the product of paths of influence. This path-analytic approach eliminates the need for discrete hypothesis tests about components of the model to support a claim of mediation, as Judd et al.'s method requires, because it relies only on an inference about the product of paths-the indirect effect. We generalize methods of inference for the indirect effect widely used in between-participant designs to this within-participant version of mediation analysis, including bootstrap confidence intervals and Monte Carlo confidence intervals. Using this path-analytic approach, we extend the method to models with multiple mediators operating in parallel and serially and discuss the comparison of indirect effects in these more complex models. We offer macros and code for SPSS, SAS, and Mplus that conduct these analyses. (PsycINFO Database Record
Drawing on alternative perspectives about the automaticity of dispositional judgments, we examine whether the motivation to attract the other (i.e., selling orientation) in interpersonal first meetings (e.g., job interviews) helps or hinders the accuracy and validity of dispositional judgments. In a laboratory study (Study 1), we found that selling orientation reduced the accuracy of interviewers judgments about applicants core self-evaluations. Then, we investigated the real-world implications of selling orientation in a field study (Study 2) with two different samples (Samples A and B) and found that a selling orientation negatively influenced the predictive validity of interviewers judgments. Specifically, when selling orientation was low, interviewers judgments accurately predicted which applicants would be most (and least) successful as newcomers in the organization (in terms of citizenship, performance, and fit). However, when selling orientation was high, interviewers judgments no longer predicted applicant outcomes. Together, these results suggest that making dispositional judgments in interpersonal first meetings is an effortful process that is hindered by focusing on other goals (e.g., selling). We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of these findings. © Academy of Management, all rights reserved. Contents may not be copied, emailed, posted to a listserv, or otherwise transmitted without the copyright holder's express written permission. Users may print, download, or email articles for individual use only.
This research investigated the role of contemplation, conversation (conceptualized as social contemplation), and explanation in right-wrong decisions. Several theories suggest that contemplation or morally oriented conversation will promote ethical decisions and that immediate choice or self-interested conversation will not; other theories suggest that individuals' explanations will reinforce their decisions. An experimental task tempting people to lie supported all of these predictions. In addition, truth tellers viewed the situation as morally oriented, and non-truth tellers viewed it as oriented around self-interest, both before and after their decisions. These findings provided the basis for a new process model of moral decision making.
Women select into business school at a lower rate than men and are underrepresented in high-ranking positions in business organizations. We examined gender differences in reactions to ethical compromises as one possible explanation for these disparities. In Study 1, when reading decisions that compromised ethical values for social status and monetary gains, women reported feeling more moral outrage and perceived less business sense in the decisions than men. In Study 2, we established a causal relationship between aversion to ethical compromises and disinterest in business careers by manipulating the presence of ethical compromises in job descriptions. As hypothesized, an interaction between gender and presence of ethical compromises emerged. Only when jobs involved making ethical compromises did women report less interest in the jobs than men. Women's moral reservations mediated these effects. In Study 3, we found that women implicitly associated business with immorality more than men did.
Trust in others' honesty is a key component of the long-term performance of firms, industries, and even whole countries. However, in recent years, numerous scandals involving fraud have undermined confidence in the financial industry. Contemporary commentators have attributed these scandals to the financial sector's business culture, but no scientific evidence supports this claim. Here we show that employees of a large, international bank behave, on average, honestly in a control condition. However, when their professional identity as bank employees is rendered salient, a significant proportion of them become dishonest. This effect is specific to bank employees because control experiments with employees from other industries and with students show that they do not become more dishonest when their professional identity or bank-related items are rendered salient. Our results thus suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm, implying that measures to re-establish an honest culture are very important.
It is well understood that moral identity substantially influences moral judgments.
However, occupational identities are also replete with moral content, and individuals
may have multiple occupational identities within a given work role (e.g., engineer
and manager). Consequently, we apply the lenses of moral universalism and moral
particularism to categorize occupational identities and explore their moral prescriptions.
We present and test a model of occupational identities as implicitly held and
dynamically activated knowledge structures, cued by context and containing associated
content about the absolute and/or relationship-dependent moral obligations owed
by an actor to stakeholders. Results from one field study and two situated experiments
with dual-occupation individuals indicate that moral obligations embedded in occupational
identities influence actors’ work role moral judgments in a predictable and
meaningful manner.
The question of when people rely on stereotypic preconceptions in judging others was investigated in two studies. As a person's motivation or ability to process information systematically is diminished, the person may rely to an increasing extent on stereotypes, when available, as a way of simplifying the task of generating a response. It was hypothesized that circadian variations in arousal levels would be related to social perceivers' propensity to stereotype others by virtue of their effects on motivation and processing capacity. In support of this hypothesis, subjects exhibited stereotypic biases in their judgments to a much greater extent when the judgments were rendered at a nonoptimal time of day (i.e., in the morning for “night people” and in the evening for “morning people”). In Study One, this pattern was found in probability judgments concerning personal characteristics; in Study Two, the pattern was obtained in perceptions of guilt in allegations of student misbehavior. Results generalized over a range of different types of social stereotypes and suggest that biological processes should be considered in attempts to conceptualize the determinants of stereotyping.
Research on ethical decision making, or behavioral ethics, in organizations has developed from a small niche area to a burgeoning stand‐alone field, one that has gained not only in number of articles written but in the legitimacy of the topic and the field. Our review motivated us to first try and summarize the field, not by comparing it to existing theoretical paradigms, but rather by observing what the data were telling us. We present our summary in the form of a model of ethical decision making and a typology that distinguishes intentionality of actions from ethicality of actions. After presenting this summary of the data, we critically review the research in this area, noting those areas which offer substantial insight and those that do not. In looking to the future and how the field can enhance the former and mitigate the latter, we identify several areas in which meaningful progress can be made, including defining what is “ethical”, revisiting unsubstantiated assumptions, focusing on the processes of ethical decision making, fixing methodological issues, and disentangling the outcomes of ethical decisions.
Recent theoretical developments have enabled the empirical study of trust for specific referents in organizations. The authors conducted a 14-month field study of employee trust for top management. A 9-month quasi-experiment found that the implementation of a more acceptable performance appraisal system increased trust for top management. The 3 proposed factors of trustworthiness (ability, benevolence, and integrity) mediated the relationship between perceptions of the appraisal system and trust. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Research on the associative structure of social stereotypes and trait-defined categories has shown that stereotypes are associatively richer, more visual, and more distinctive (S. M. Andersen and R. L. Klatzky; see record
1987-34370-001). We hypothesized that stereotypes might also operate more efficiently than trait-defined categories in social information processing. Participants were presented with sentences pairing either a stereotype or a trait label with an overt act or an internal state. Participants judged whether or not the designated target person would be likely to do or to experience what was described in the sentence. As predicted, participants judged the stereotype sentences more quickly than the trait sentences. An incidental recall test of memory for the target terms, cued by the acts and states, showed that participants were also better able to remember the stereotypes than the traits. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A framework for understanding the etiology of organizational behavior is presented. The framework is based on theory and research from interactional psychology, vocational psychology, I/O psychology, and organizational theory. The framework proposes that organizations are functions of the kinds of people they contain and, further, that the people there are functions of an attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) cycle. The ASA cycle is proposed as an alternative model for understanding organizations and the causes of the structures, processes, and technology of organizations. First, the ASA framework is developed through a series of propositions. Then some implications of the model are outlined, including (1) the difficulty of bringing about change in organizations, (2) the utility of personality and interest measures for understanding organizational behavior, (3) the genesis of organizational climate and culture, (4) the importance of recruitment, and (5) the need for person-based theories of leadership and job attitudes. It is concluded that contemporary I/O psychology is overly dominated by situationist theories of the behavior of organizations and the people in them.
This paper investigates the use of deception in two negotiation studies. Study 1 (N=80) demonstrates that direct questions and solidarity curtail deception. Study 2 (N=74 dyads) demonstrates that direct questions are particularly effective in curtailing lies of omission, but may actually increase the incidence of lies of commission. These findings highlight the importance of misrepresentation to the negotiation process and suggest approaches for contending with deception.
This paper examines the root of unethical dicisions by identifying the psychological forces that promote self-deception. Self-deception allows one to behave self-interestedly while, at the same time, falsely believing that one's moral principles were upheld. The end result of this internal con game is that the ethical aspects of the decision fade into the background, the moral implications obscured. In this paper we identify four enablers of self-deception, including language euphemisms, the slippery slope of decision-making, errors in perceptual causation, and constraints induced by representations of the self. We argue that current solutions to unethical behaviors in organizations, such as ethics training, do not consider the important role of these enablers and hence will be constrained in their potential, producing only limited effectiveness. Amendments to these solutions, which do consider the powerful role of self-deception in unethical decisions, are offered.
Three studies contrasting Indian and American negotiators tested hypotheses derived from theory proposing why there are cultural differences in trust and how cultural differences in trust influence negotiation strategy. Study 1 (a survey) documented that Indian negotiators trust their counterparts less than American negotiators. Study 2 (a negotiation simulation) linked American and Indian negotiators' self-reported trust and strategy to their insight and joint gains. Study 3 replicated and extended Study 2 using independently coded negotiation strategy data, allowing for stronger causal inference. Overall, the strategy associated with Indian negotiators' reluctance to extend interpersonal (as opposed to institutional) trust produced relatively poor outcomes. Our data support an expanded theoretical model of negotiation, linking culture to trust, strategies, and outcomes.
Four studies examined the relation between college students' own attitudes toward alcohol use and their estimates of the attitudes of their peers. All studies found widespread evidence of pluralistic ignorance: Students believed that they were more uncomfortable with campus alcohol practices than was the average student. Study 2 demonstrated this perceived self-other difference also with respect to one's friends. Study 3 traced attitudes toward drinking over the course of a semester and found gender differences in response to perceived deviance: Male students shifted their attitudes over time in the direction of what they mistakenly believed to be the norm, whereas female students showed no such attitude change. Study 4 found that students' perceived deviance correlated with various measures of campus alienation, even though that deviance was illusory. The implications of these results for general issues of norm estimation and responses to perceived deviance are discussed.
This article integrates theory from the cognitive tradition in negotiation with theory on culture and examines cultural influences on cognitive representations of conflict. The authors predicted that although there may be universal (etic) dimensions of conflict construals, there also may be culture-specific (emic) representations of conflict in the United States and Japan. Results of multidimensional scaling analyses of U.S. and Japanese conflict episodes supported this view. Japanese and Americans construed conflicts through a compromise versus win frame (R. L. Pinkley, 1990), providing evidence of a universal dimension of conflict construal. As the authors predicted, Japanese perceived conflicts to be more compromise-focused, as compared with Americans. There were also unique dimensions of construal among Americans and Japanese (infringements to self and giri violations, respectively), suggesting that identical conflict episodes are perceived differently across cultures.
Two studies were conducted to examine the implications of an apology versus a denial for repairing trust after an alleged violation. Results reveal that trust was repaired more successfully when mistrusted parties (a) apologized for violations concerning matters of competence but denied culpability for violations concerning matters of integrity, and (b) had apologized for violations when there was subsequent evidence of guilt but had denied culpability for violations when there was subsequent evidence of innocence. Supplementary analyses also revealed that the interactive effects of violation type and violation response on participants' trusting intentions were mediated by their trusting beliefs. Combined, these findings provide needed insight and supporting evidence concerning how trust might be repaired in the aftermath of a violation.
The authors propose that experiments that utilize mediational analyses as suggested by R. M. Baron and D. A. Kenny (1986) are overused and sometimes improperly held up as necessary for a good social psychological paper. The authors argue that when it is easy to manipulate and measure a proposed psychological process that a series of experiments that demonstrates the proposed causal chain is superior. They further argue that when it is easy to manipulate a proposed psychological process but difficult to measure it that designs that examine underlying process by utilizing moderation can be effective. It is only when measurement of a proposed psychological process is easy and manipulation of it is difficult that designs that rely on mediational analyses should be preferred, and even in these situations careful consideration should be given to the limiting factors of such designs.
The trust literature distinguishes trustworthiness (the ability, benevolence, and integrity of a trustee) and trust propensity (a dispositional willingness to rely on others) from trust (the intention to accept vulnerability to a trustee based on positive expectations of his or her actions). Although this distinction has clarified some confusion in the literature, it remains unclear (a) which trust antecedents have the strongest relationships with trust and (b) whether trust fully mediates the effects of trustworthiness and trust propensity on behavioral outcomes. Our meta-analysis of 132 independent samples summarized the relationships between the trust variables and both risk taking and job performance (task performance, citizenship behavior, counterproductive behavior). Meta-analytic structural equation modeling supported a partial mediation model wherein trustworthiness and trust propensity explained incremental variance in the behavioral outcomes when trust was controlled. Further analyses revealed that the trustworthiness dimensions also predicted affective commitment, which had unique relationships with the outcomes when controlling for trust. These results generalized across different types of trust measures (i.e., positive expectations measures, willingness-to-be-vulnerable measures, and direct measures) and different trust referents (i.e., leaders, coworkers).
Recent theorizing in moral psychology extends rationalist models by calling attention to social and cultural influences (J. Haidt, 2001). Six studies using adolescents, university students, and adults measured the associations among the self-importance of moral identity, moral cognitions, and behavior. The psychometric properties of the measure were assessed through an examination of the underlying factor structure (Study 1) and convergent, nomological, and discriminant validity analyses (Studies 2 and 3). The predictive validity of the instrument was assessed by examinations of the relationships among the self-importance of moral identity, various psychological outcomes, and behavior (Studies 4, 5, and 6). The results are discussed in terms of models of moral behavior, social identity measurement, and the need to consider moral self-conceptions in explaining moral conduct.
A national sample of purchasing professionals was used to replicate the SOCO scale with buyers assessing the customer orientation of salespeople who call on them. The results are almost identical to those obtained when salespeople assessed their own degree of customer orientation, except that buyers’ mean ratings are substantially lower than salespersons’ mean ratings.
The concept of customer orientation in salespeople is defined, a scale is developed to measure the degree to which salespeople engage in customer-oriented selling, and the properties of the scale are reported. A test of the nomological validity indicates the use of customer-oriented selling is related to the ability of the salespeople to help their customers and the quality of the customer-salesperson relationship.
Philosophers, psychologists, and economists have long asserted that deception harms trust. We challenge this claim. Across four studies, we demonstrate that deception can increase trust. Specifically, prosocial lies increase the willingness to pass money in the trust game, a behavioral measure of benevolence-based trust. In Studies 1a and 1b, we find that altruistic lies increase trust when deception is directly experienced and when it is merely observed. In Study 2, we demonstrate that mutually beneficial lies also increase trust. In Study 3, we disentangle the effects of intentions and deception; intentions are far more important than deception for building benevolence-based trust. In Study 4, we examine how prosocial lies influence integrity-based trust. We introduce a new economic game, the Rely-or-Verify game, to measure integrity-based trust. Prosocial lies increase benevolence-based trust, but harm integrity-based trust. Our findings expand our understanding of deception and deepen our insight into the mechanics of trust.
Recognizing man's four achievements in dealing with differences among men, i.e., science, politics, hierarchy, and law, the authors foresee a fifth achievement by which men will ultimately be able to work out their differences. It will be the establishment of a problemsolving society in which its members can resolve differences through their own insight. Here presented is the Conflict Grid for use in evaluating good or bad ways for ending disputes as a vehicle for creative problem solving in the future and a basis for such a problem-solving society.
Individuals, groups, and societies all experience conflict, and attempt to resolve it in numerous ways. The Oxford Handbook of Economic Conflict Resolution brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to offer perspectives on the current state and future challenges in negotiation and conflict resolution. It aims to act as an aid in identifying new research topics. It hopes also to provide a guide to current debates and identify complementarities between approaches taken by different disciplines and the insights which those approaches generate. Leading researchers from the fields of economics, psychology, organizational behavior, policy, and other fields have contributed articles. The volume is organized to juxtapose purposefully contributions from different fields to enable cross-fertilization between the disciplines and to generate new and creative approaches to studying the topic. These articles provide a lens into current scholarship, and a window into the potential future of this field. The confluence of research perspectives represented here aims to identify further synergies and advances in the understanding of conflict resolution.
Trust is critical for organizations, effective management, and efficient negotiations, yet trust violations are common. Prior work has often assumed trust to be fragile-easily broken and difficult to repair. We investigate this proposition in a laboratory study and find that trust harmed by untrustworthy behavior can be effectively restored when individuals observe a consistent series of trustworthy actions. Trust harmed by the same untrustworthy actions and deception, however, never fully recovers-even when deceived participants receive a promise, an apology, and observe a consistent series of trustworthy actions. We also find that a promise to change behavior can significantly speed the trust recovery process, but prior deception harms the effectiveness of a promise in accelerating trust recovery. (c) 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
This concern, as expressed by Theodore Levitt in his In-novations in Marketing, has been shared by marketing and sales executives for decades. In fact, practitioners in the world of selling and marketing academicians have long expressed concern regarding the relatively low public acceptance of salespeople compared to occupations that require similar levels of education, knowledge, and ability (2). Their concern is justifiable as this phenomenon is believed to be a major contributor to the fact that selling careers appear less attractive than alternative careers to many people (3) and low public acceptance may actually decrease the selfesteem and job effectiveness of salespeople (4).
We demonstrate that some lies are perceived to be more ethical than honest statements. Across three studies, we find that individuals who tell prosocial lies, lies told with the intention of benefitting others, are perceived to be more moral than individuals who tell the truth. In Study 1, we compare altruistic lies to selfish truths. In Study 2, we introduce a stochastic deception game to disentangle the influence of deception, outcomes, and intentions on perceptions of moral character. In Study 3, we demonstrate that moral judgments of lies are sensitive to the consequences of lying for the deceived party, but insensitive to the consequences of lying for the liar. Both honesty and benevolence are essential components of moral character. We find that when these values conflict, benevolence may be more important than honesty. More broadly, our findings suggest that the moral foundation of care may be more important than the moral foundation of justice.
We review research and theory on the HEXACO personality dimensions of Honesty-Humility (H), Agreeableness (A), and Emotionality (E), with particular attention to the following topics: (1) the origins of the HEXACO model in lexical studies of personality structure, and the content of the H, A, and E factors in those studies; (2) the operationalization of the H, A, and E factors in the HEXACO Personality Inventory-Revised; (3) the construct validity of self-reports on scales measuring the H factor; (4) the theoretical distinction between H and A; (5) similarity and assumed similarity between social partners in personality, with a focus on H and A; (6) the extent to which H (and A and E) variance is represented in instruments assessing the "Five-Factor Model" of personality; and (7) the relative validity of scales assessing the HEXACO and Five-Factor Model dimensions in predicting criteria conceptually relevant to H, A, and E.
Research on ethical decision making has been heavily influenced by normative decision theories that view intelligent choices as involving conscious deliberation and analysis. Recent developments in moral psychology, however, suggest that moral functions involved in ethical decision making are metaphorical and embodied. The research presented here suggests that deliberative decision making may actually increase unethical behaviors and reduce altruistic motives when it overshadows implicit, intuitive influences on moral judgments and decisions. Three lab experiments explored the potential ethical dangers of deliberative decision making. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that deliberative decision making, activated by a math problem-solving task or by simply framing the choice as a decision rather than an intuitive reaction, increased deception in a one-shot deception game. Experiment 3—which activated systematic thinking or intuitive feeling about the choice to donate to a charity—found that deliberative decision making could also decrease altruism. These findings highlight the potential ethical downsides of a rationalistic approach toward ethical decision making and call for a better understanding of the intuitive nature of moral functioning.
The authors combine findings from 155 samples of more than 31,000 salespeople to test alternative models of antecedents and consequences of adaptive selling behavior (ASB) and customer orientation (CO). A random-effects meta-analysis yields average values for 28 different correlations ranging from -.16 to .35, 19 of which are significant. Controlling for salesperson gender and selling experience, structural equation modeling indicates that ASB increases self-rated, manager-rated, and objective measures of performance, whereas CO increases only self-rated performance. Both ASB and CO increase job satisfaction. Tests of reciprocal relationships indicate that ASB increases CO and job satisfaction increases performance rather than vice versa. Selling experience increases performance but not job satisfaction, and saleswomen rate their performance and satisfaction slightly higher than salesmen do. The magnitudes of the relationships indicate that ASB and selling experience have greater effects than CO and gender on salesperson performance.
The importance of ethical behavior to an organization has never been more apparent, and in recent years researchers have generated a great deal of knowledge about the management of individual ethical behavior in organizations. We review this literature and attempt to provide a coherent portrait of the current state of the field. We discuss individual, group, and organizational influences and consider gaps in current knowledge and obstacles that limit our understanding. We conclude by offering directions for future research on behavioral ethics in organizations.
This paper examined negotiator behavior in a variable-sum two-party negotiation task and its impact on individual and joint negotiator out-come. Specifically, we examined the role of negotiator opening offer, reciprocity and complementarity of the use of tactics, systematic progression of offers, and information sharing in a negotiation with integrative potential. Results indicated that initial offers affect final outcome differently across buyers and sellers. The buyer's initial offer was curvilinearly related to his or her final outcome in the form of an inverted-U. The seller's initial offer was positive-linearly related to seller's outcome. Second, negotiators reciprocated and complemented both distributive and integrative tactics. In addition, highly integrative dyads differed from less efficient dyads in their reciprocation of integrative behaviors and complementarity of distributive behaviors. Third, approximately forty percent of offers made represented systematic concessions, but the proportion of offers reflecting systematic concessions was not related to the efficiency of the joint outcome. Finally, while information sharing did appear to have a positive effect on the efficiency of agreements, differences in the amount of information provided did not affect the proportion of outcome claimed by each party.
This paper investigates the repair of trust by examining the cognitive and interpersonal processes through which people resolve differences in their interpersonal beliefs. It begins by discussing the phenomenon of trust, the ease with which trust can be violated, and the challenge of trust repair. It then draws on numerous literatures to develop a multi-level conceptualization of how trust repair may be pursued. Finally, it integrates these insights to identify three overarching implications for research.
Multidimensional constructs are widely used to represent several distinct dimensions as a single theoretical concept. The utility of multidimensional constructs relative to their dimensions has generated considerable debate, and this debate creates a dilemma for researchers who want the breadth and comprehensiveness of multidimensional constructs and the precision and clarity of their dimensions. To address this dilemma, this article presents an integrative analytical framework that incorporates multidimensional constructs and their dimensions, using structural equation modeling with latent variables. This framework permits the study of broad questions regarding multidimensional constructs along with specific questions concerning the dimensions of these constructs. The framework also provides tests of issues underlying the multidimensional construct debate, thereby allowing researchers to address these issues on a study-by-study basis. The framework is illustrated using data from studies of the effects of personality on responses to conflict and the effects of work attitudes on employee adaptation.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a relatively new website that contains the major elements required to conduct research: an integrated participant compensation system; a large participant pool; and a streamlined process of study design, participant recruitment, and data collection. In this article, we describe and evaluate the potential contributions of MTurk to psychology and other social sciences. Findings indicate that (a) MTurk participants are slightly more demographically diverse than are standard Internet samples and are significantly more diverse than typical American college samples; (b) participation is affected by compensation rate and task length, but participants can still be recruited rapidly and inexpensively; (c) realistic compensation rates do not affect data quality; and (d) the data obtained are at least as reliable as those obtained via traditional methods. Overall, MTurk can be used to obtain high-quality data inexpensively and rapidly.
© The Author(s) 2011.
This article examines the relationship among conflict orientation, competitive bargaining, and unethical behavior. We report results from a negotiation study (N= 111 dyads) involving a 7-action prisoner's dilemma. We coded participants’ conflict frames and their use of both competitive ethical tactics and deception. Our results demonstrate that negotiators’ conflict frames influence the use of both types of behavior. While prior work has conceptualized competitive ethical tactics as distinct from unethical tactics (e.g., deception), our results suggest that in practice negotiators who adopt a competitive orientation use both types of tactics in tandem. We also examine the influence of deception on the bargaining process and outcomes. We find that the use of deception significantly distorts targets’ beliefs, influences targets’ decisions, increases deceivers’ profits, and harms targets’ profits. We discuss theoretical implications of these results and offer prescriptions for curtailing deception.
This study examines salesperson stereotypes and their effect on the selling environment. After reviewing relevant literature,
the authors advance a hierarchical structure of salesperson stereotype categories. Experimental results suggest that stereotypes
influence consumer emotions, and these emotions then mediate the relationship between stereotype activation and subsequent
consumer cognitions.
We hypothesized that frequency and quality of deception influences how people perceive those who lie to them and that people subsequently increase deceptive behavior as a consequence of being lied to. In Study 1, participants were covertly videotaped conversing with a partner. Following the conversation, participants evaluated partners, and partners reviewed the videotape, identifying deceptions that they told. Findings indicated that partner’s frequency of deception was inversely related to likeability. In Study 2, participants watched a videotape of a confederate who appeared to produce one or four exaggerated or minimized lies, and then evaluated the confederate. Participants and confederates subsequently engaged in a conversation. When participants witnessed either one exaggerated lie, one or four minimal lies, or no lies they trusted and liked the confederate more than when witnessing four exaggerated lies. Moreover, participants increased their own use of deception as a function of the severity and quantity of confederate’s lies.
This article reports the results of an examination of the Selling Orientation-Customer Orientation scale to determine if the number of items could be reduced while still maintaining the scale's dimensionality and consistency. Analysis of a new Australian data set was undertaken using data from 250 salespeople, 157 of their managers and 276 of their customers in a range of business to business markets. The findings provide evidence that salespeople's customer orientation, as defined by Saxe and Weitz (1982), can be measured with little information loss by ten items, rather than the twenty-four items originally suggested. This significant reduction in length may contribute to a more reliable and valid scale by reducing response fatigue and acquiescence bias, as well as making it possible to include the construct in larger studies with other multiple item scales. Further research is suggested to test the revised scale across a number of industries and consumer groups, to verify its generalizability.
Ethical decision making is vulnerable to the forces of automaticity. People behave differently in the face of a potential loss versus a potential gain, even when the two situations are transparently identical. Across three experiments, decision makers engaged in more unethical behavior if a decision was presented in a loss frame than if the decision was presented in a gain frame. In Experiment 1, participants in the loss-frame condition were more likely to favor gathering "insider information" than were participants in the gain-frame condition. In Experiment 2, negotiators in the loss-frame condition lied more than negotiators in the gain-frame condition. In Experiment 3, the tendency to be less ethical in the loss-frame condition occurred under time pressure and was eliminated through the removal of time pressure.
This paper investigates the dynamics of deception and retribution in repeated ultimatum bargaining. Anonymous dyads exchanged messages and offers in a series of four ultimatum bargaining games that had prospects for relatively large monetary outcomes. Variations in each party's knowledge of the other's resources and alternatives created opportunities for deception. Revelation of prior unknowns exposed deceptions and created opportunities for retribution in subsequent interactions. Results showed that although proposers and responders chose deceptive strategies almost equally, proposers told more outright lies. Both were more deceptive when their private information was never revealed, and proposers were most deceptive when their potential profits were largest. Revelation of proposers' lies had little effect on their subsequent behavior even though responders rejected their offers more than similar offers from truthful proposers or proposers whose prior deceit was never revealed. The discussion and conclusions address the dynamics of deception and retribution in repeated bargaining interactions. Copyright 2000 Academic Press.
In most models of bargaining, costless and unverifiable lies about private information and incredible threats about future actions are considered cheap talk and do not impact outcomes. In practice, however, this type of talk is often an integral part of bargaining. This experiment examines the impact of cheap talk in an ultimatum bargaining setting with two-sided imperfect information. In contrast to previous work, the experiment provides an opportunity for deceptions to be revealed and punished. Results show that lies about private information and (incredible) threats of future actions do influence bargaining outcomes (offers and responses) in both the short- and long-term.
Commissioned salespeople get a bad rap. Here’s why you should hire more
- DeFries
The mystique of super-salesmanship
- McMurray