Narratives and Morality

Narratives as Antecedents and consequences of unethical behavior

One of the primary challenges facing organizations today lies in the core of human morality: mitigating widespread ethically questionable actions by organizational actors at all levels. My research centers on identifying narratives that have important implications for human morality and demonstrating how and why narratives can become self-fulfilling in the context of ethical decision-making. Through my research, I have discovered that narratives about the effort required for honesty can influence subsequent dishonest behavior. Additionally, I have explored how academic theories (e.g., consideration of opportunity costs) can shape individuals’ narratives about honesty as an effortful behavior and impact their ethical decision-making.

Compassion fatigue as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Believing compassion is limited increases fatigue and decreases compassion (Psychological Science, 2023)

People’s compassion responses often weaken with repeated exposure to suffering, a phenomenon known as compassion fatigue. Why is it so difficult to continue feeling compassion in response to others’ suffering? We propose that people’s limited-compassion mindsets—beliefs about compassion as a limited resource and a fatiguing experience—can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces compassion fatigue. Across four studies of adults sampled from university students and online participant pools in the United States, we show that there is variability in people’s compassion mindsets, that these mindsets can be changed with convincing information, and that limited-compassion mindsets predict lower feelings of compassion, lower-quality social support, and more fatigue. This contributes to our understanding of factors that underlie compassion fatigue and supports the broader idea that people’s beliefs about the nature of emotions affect how emotions are experienced. Together, this research contributes to developing a strategy for increasing people’s capacity to feel compassion and their social support.

Lay beliefs about homo economicus: How and why does economics education make us see honesty as effortful? (Academy of Management Learning & Education, 2023)

Repeated business scandals have raised concerns about the possible role that specializing in economics plays in individual morality. We explored whether and how economics specialization is positively related to unethical behavior through the lay belief that honesty is effortful. We found that people who specialized in economics were more likely to hold the belief that honesty takes effort—a finding that was consistent across three independent samples (N = 1,561), including a large, nationally representative sample. We also found in Studies 2 and 3 that beliefs about honesty as effortful behavior mediated the relationship between economics specialization and the willingness to engage in unethical behavior, suggesting that economics specialization influences unethical behavior through an implicit pathway. Lastly, we found in Study 3 that economics specialization led people to hold beliefs about honesty as effortful behavior because it made them more utilitarian in their decision-making. We call for business schools to do more to encourage students to question the assumptions underlying the theories they are taught, and to broaden their perspectives beyond economic and utilitarian considerations.

The cost of anti-Asian racism during the COVID-19 pandemic (Nature Human Behaviour, 2023)

Anti-Chinese sentiment increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, presenting as a considerable spike in overt violence and hatred directed at Asian American individuals. However, it is less clear how subtle patterns of consumer discrimination, which are difficult to directly observe yet greatly impact Asian American livelihoods, changed through the pandemic. Here we examine this in the context of restaurants—ubiquitous small businesses that sell goods that are closely entwined with ethnicity. Using a series of surveys, online search trends and consumer traffic data, we find that Asian restaurants experienced an 18.4% decrease in traffic (estimated US$7.42 billion lost revenue in 2020) relative to comparable non-Asian restaurants, with greater decreases in areas with higher levels of support for Donald Trump. Our findings are consistent with the roles of collective blame, out-group homogeneity and ethnic misidentification in explaining how anti-China rhetoric can harm the Asian American community, underlining the importance of avoiding racism and stigmatization in political and public health communications.

The interpersonal costs of dishonesty: How dishonest behavior reduces individuals’ ability to read others’ emotions (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2019)

In this research, we examine the unintended consequences of dishonest behavior for one’s interpersonal abilities and subsequent ethical behavior. Specifically, we unpack how dishonest conduct can reduce one’s generalized empathic accuracy—the ability to accurately read other people’s emotional states—distinguishing these two constructs from one another and demonstrating a causal relationship. Across seven studies (n=2,377), we find support for (1) a correlational and causal account of dishonest behavior reducing empathic accuracy, (2) an underlying mechanism of reduced relational self-construal (i.e., the tendency to define the self in terms of close relationships), (3) negative downstream consequences of impaired empathic accuracy in terms of dehumanization and subsequent dishonesty, and (4) a physiological trait (i.e., vagal reactivity) that serves as a boundary condition for the relationship between dishonest behavior and empathic accuracy. We discuss the implications of our results for the literature on behavioral ethics and interpersonal cognition.

Cheater’s hide and seek: Strategic cognitive network activation during ethical decision making (Social Network, 2019)

We consider the dynamic process by which people cognitively activate their social networks during ethical decision making. We compare actors’ goals during anticipatory and ex-post phases of ethical decision making, and propose that they trigger hide-and-seek patterns of network activation. Experiment 1 links cognitively activated network structures with self-report ethical behavior. Consistent with “hiding goals,” actors randomly assigned to anticipate behaving unethically (versus honestly or in the control condition), activated sparser networks that could better hide unethicality (Experiment 2). Consistent with “seeking” goals, participants randomly assigned to unethical (versus honest) conditions mentally activated dense networks, seeking out social support to uphold their sense of self (Experiment 3a). This network activation process is mitigated when participants affirm themselves (Experiment 3b). Experiment 4 replicates these hide and seek patterns of social network activation in a single study that captures both the anticipatory and ex-post phases of ethical decision making.

Lay theories of effortful honesty: Does the honesty-effort association justify making a dishonest decision? (Journal of Applied Psychology, 2018)

Are our moral decisions and actions influenced by our beliefs about how much effort it takes to do the right thing? We hypothesized that the belief that honesty is effortful predicts subsequent dishonest behavior because it facilitates one’s ability to justify such actions. In Study 1 (N = 210), we developed an implicit measure of people’s beliefs about whether honesty is effortful, and we found that this lay theory predicts dishonesty. In Study 2 (N = 339), we experimentally manipulated individuals’ lay theories about honesty and effort and found that an individual’s lay theory that honesty is effortful increased subsequent dishonesty. In Study 3, we manipulated (Study 3a; N = 294) and measured (Study 3b; N = 153) lay theories, and then manipulated the strength of situational force that encourages dishonesty, and found that an individual’s lay theory influences subsequent dishonesty only in a weak situation, where individuals have more agency to interpret the situation. This research provides novel insights into how our lay theories linking honesty and effort can help us rationalize our dishonesty, independent of whether a particular moral decision requires effort or not.

Poker-faced morality: Concealing emotions leads to utilitarian decision making (Organizational Behavior & Human Decision Processes, 2015)

This paper examines how making deliberate efforts to regulate aversive affective responses influences people’s decisions in moral dilemmas. We hypothesize that emotion regulation—mainly suppression and reappraisal—will encourage utilitarian choices in emotionally charged contexts and that this effect will be mediated by the decision maker’s decreased deontological inclinations. In Study 1, we find that individuals who endorsed the utilitarian option (vs. the deontological option) were more likely to suppress their emotional expressions. In Studies 2a, 2b, and 3, we instruct participants to either regulate their emotions, using one of two different strategies (reappraisal vs. suppression), or not to regulate, and we collect data through the concurrent monitoring of psycho-physiological measures. We find that participants are more likely to make utilitarian decisions when asked to suppress their emotions rather than when they do not regulate their affect. In Study 4, we show that one’s reduced deontological inclinations mediate the relationship between emotion regulation and utilitarian decision making. 

Emotion regulation influences political ideology: Does reappraisal decrease support for conservative policies? (PLoS ONE, 2013)

Cognitive scientists, behavior geneticists, and political scientists have identified several ways in which emotions influence political attitudes, and psychologists have shown that emotion regulation can have an important causal effect on physiology, cognition, and subjective experience. However, no work to date explores the possibility that emotion regulation may shape political ideology and attitudes toward policies. Here, we conduct four studies that investigate the role of a particular emotion regulation strategy – reappraisal in particular. Two observational studies show that individual differences in emotion regulation styles predict variation in political orientations and support for conservative policies. In the third study, we experimentally induce disgust as the target emotion to be regulated and show that use of reappraisal reduces the experience of disgust, thereby decreasing moral concerns associated with conservatism. In the final experimental study, we show that use of reappraisal successfully attenuates the relationship between trait-level disgust sensitivity and support for conservative policies. Our findings provide the first evidence of a critical link between emotion regulation and political attitudes. 

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