Moral Judgments and Ethical Behavior

How do narratives shape who we see as deserving of help, and what we believe about the cost of doing the right thing? This stream examines the lay theories and moral judgments that guide ethical behavior at work.

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

Narratives influence who receives help at work. I discovered the discerning saints effect: intrinsically motivated employees do not help indiscriminately. Instead, they moralize their motivation, converting a personal preference into a moral value, then selectively help colleagues who share that motivation while withholding help from those perceived as extrinsically driven. Across a field study of 794 employees in 185 teams at a Latin American bank and three experiments, I found this selective helping persists when competence and warmth are held constant, isolating perceived motivation as the driver. The finding challenges the positive view of intrinsic motivation by revealing an exclusionary dark side: moralization creates an underrecognized source of workplace inequality, disadvantaging those who lack intrinsic motivation, or cannot afford to work for passion alone.

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

Where do beliefs about honesty come from? I traced them to their source: academic training. 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.