Narratives and Morality

Narratives as Antecedents and Consequences of Morality

Discerning saints: The moralization of intrinsic motivation and selective helping at work (Academy of Management Journal, 2023)

Intrinsic motivation has received widespread attention as a predictor of positive work outcomes, including employees’ prosocial behavior. In the current research, we offer a more nuanced view by proposing that intrinsic motivation does not uniformly increase prosocial behavior toward all others. Specifically, we argue that employees with higher intrinsic motivation are more likely to value intrinsic motivation and associate it with having higher morality (i.e., they moralize it). When employees moralize intrinsic motivation, we suggest, they perceive others with higher intrinsic motivation as being more moral and deserving of their help and thus engage in more prosocial behavior toward those others. We provide empirical support for our theoretical model across a large-scale, team-level field study in a Latin American financial institution (N = 781, k = 185) and a set of three online studies, including a pre-registered experiment (Ns = 245, 243, and 1,245), where we develop a measure of the moralization of intrinsic motivation and provide both causal and mediating evidence. Our theory and results reveal that employees with higher intrinsic motivation are more likely to moralize their own motivation and are more attuned to others’ intrinsic motivation as a signal of morality, which underlies their decision to help them selectively. This research therefore complicates our understanding of intrinsic motivation by unveiling how its moralization may at times dim the positive light of intrinsic motivation itself. 

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.

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.