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