Loyalty to friends is an important moral value, but does that mean snitching on friends is considered immoral? Across six preregistered studies, we examine how loyalty obligations impact people’s ...moral evaluations of snitching (i.e., turning in others who commit transgressions). In vignette and incentivized partner choice paradigms, we find that witnesses who snitch (vs. do not snitch) are seen as more moral and as better leaders (Studies 1–6), regardless of whether they snitch on a friend or an acquaintance (Studies 1–3). We find that a willingness to turn in one’s friends increases perceived morality, while an unwillingness to do so diminishes it, with the latter effect exhibiting a stronger impact than the former (Study 2). Our experiments also demonstrate that snitches receive less moral credit when snitching on nonmoral (vs. moral) transgressions (Study 3) and when snitching aligns with self-interest (Study 4). We demonstrate that although snitching is often seen as morally right, turning in transgressors entails important reputational trade-offs: Snitching makes one appear disloyal and a bad friend but boosts perceptions of morality and leadership. This reveals a context in which what is loyal is no longer considered moral. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved) (Source: journal abstract)
The amount of effort required to bring about a prosocial outcome can vary from low—handing a stranger the wallet she just dropped—to high—spending days tracking down the owner of a lost wallet. The ...goal of the current research is to characterize the relationship between prosocial effort and moral character judgments. Does more prosocial effort always lead to rosier moral character judgments? Across four studies (N = 1,658), we find that moral character judgments increase with prosocial effort to a point and then plateau. We find evidence that this pattern is produced, in part, by descriptive and prescriptive norms: exceeding descriptive norms increases moral character judgments, but exceeding prescriptive norms has the opposite effect, which leads to a tapering off of moral character judgments at higher levels of effort.
Despite mixed evidence for the relationship between demographic diversity and creativity, we propose that observers hold a lay belief that demographic diversity increases creativity and apply this ...lay belief in judgments about teams and their creative work. Across eight preregistered studies (
n
= 5,530), we find that observers judge teams diverse in terms of race and gender to be more creative than teams homogeneous in terms of race and gender, including in incentive-compatible predictions made about real teams competing in a creativity challenge. We also find that products attributed to demographically diverse teams are evaluated as more creative compared with identical products attributed to demographically homogenous teams. Mediation analyses provide evidence consistent with the notion that people perceive demographic diversity (i.e., social category differences) to be correlated with cognitive diversity (i.e., difference of perspectives), and this belief contributes to attributions of greater creativity to diverse teams and the ideas they generate. We can also turn off the perceived association between demographic diversity and creativity by directly manipulating people’s perceptions of team cognitive diversity. Furthermore, we find evidence of a curvilinear relationship between the proportion of racial minorities or women in a group and judgments of the group’s creativity. Together, our results suggest that the popular uptake of the belief that diversity boosts creativity may impact how creativity is identified in organizational contexts.
This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, behavioral economics and decision analysis.
Funding:
This research was supported by funds from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, and Harvard Business School, Harvard University, including a grant from the Cornell Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies.
Supplemental Material:
The data files and online appendix are available at
https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4862
.
The Double-Edged Sword of Loyalty Berry, Zachariah; Lewis, Neil A.; Sowden, Walter J.
Current directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society,
08/2021, Letnik:
30, Številka:
4
Journal Article
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Loyalty has long been associated with being moral and upstanding, but recent research has begun documenting how loyalty can lead people to do unethical things. Here we offer an integrative ...perspective on loyalty and its outcomes. We suggest that a variety of bottom-up and top-down psychological processes lead individuals to be loyal to people and organizations they have obligations to, and that these processes operate in ways that reduce the cognitive dissonance experienced when loyalties conflict with each other or with other moral principles. In this article, we articulate what loyalty is, describe the typical objects of loyalty, explain the mental processes involved in navigating loyalty dilemmas, and end by offering an integrative perspective that illuminates why loyalty leads to both ethical and unethical outcomes and when each type of outcome is likely to occur.
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body ...of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
Making it onto the shortlist is often a crucial early step toward professional advancement. For under-represented candidates, one barrier to making the shortlist is the prevalence of informal ...recruitment practices (for example, colleague recommendations). The current research investigates informal shortlists generated in male-dominant domains (for example, technology executives) and tests a theory-driven intervention to increase the consideration of female candidates. Across ten studies (N = 5,741) we asked individuals to generate an informal shortlist of candidates for a male-dominant role and then asked them to extend the list. We consistently found more female candidates in the extended (versus initial) list. This longer shortlist effect occurs because continued response generation promotes divergence from the category prototype (for example, male technology executives). Studies 3 and 4 supported this mechanism, and study 5 tested the effect of shortlist length on selection decisions. This longer shortlist intervention is a low-cost and simple way to support gender equity efforts.
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