Vicarious Dishonesty: When Psychological Closeness Creates Distance from One's Moral Compass

By Francesca Gino, Adam D. Galinsky. 2012

326 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In four studies employing multiple manipulations of psychological closeness, we found that feeling connected to another individual who engages in selfish or dishonest behavior leads people to behave more selfishly and less ethically themselves. In addition, psychologically connecting with a scoundrel led to greater moral disengagement. We also establish that vicarious justification is the mechanism explaining this effect: When participants felt psychologically close to someone who had behaved selfishly, they were more likely to consider the behavior to be less shame-worthy and less unethical; it was these lenient judgments that then led them to act more unethically themselves. These vicarious effects were moderated by whether the miscreant was identified with a photograph and by the type of behavior. Importantly, we establish a general process of vicariousness: psychological closeness produced both vicarious generosity and selfishness depending on the behavior of the person one feels psychologically connected to. These findings suggest an irony of psychological closeness: it can create distance from one’s own moral compass.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Social Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9899716fd7ead4aea4d61802a193b8d08ee071e4

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Citations in the corpus

Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North, and how we can fix it (2013, background): “Using various manipulations for psychological closeness, Gino and Galinsky (2012) found that participants judged others‟ selfish or unethical actions as less morally problematic when they had a psychological connection to them.”
Behavioral Ethics: Toward a Deeper Understanding of Moral Judgment and Dishonesty (2012, background): “Gino and her colleagues (Gino et al., 2009; Gino & Galinsky, 2012) have shown that our moral behavior is affected by the moral actions of just one other person.”
Why Do We Lie? A Practical Guide To The Dishonesty Literature (2018, background): “Even un-related artificial social identity (low social distance) seems to matter: Gino and Galinsky (2012) paired individuals with dishonest acting partners and induced an artificial closeness by telling the subjects that they shared the same birth month and school year, which created enough social…”
Growing Followers: Exploring the Effects of Leader Humility on Follower Self‐Expansion, Self‐Efficacy, and Performance (2018, unknown): “Although previous studies have demonstrated the high validity of this scale (Aron et al., 1992; Gino and Galinsky, 2012) and scholars have examined the equal predictive validity between multiple-item and single-item measures (Bergkvist and Rossiter, 2007), a singleitem measure is still a concern due”
Sharing with Friends versus Strangers: How Interpersonal Closeness Influences Word-of-Mouth Valence (2016, background): “Interpersonal closeness, the perceived psychological proximity between two people (Gino and Galinsky 2012), is a key factor that characterizes social relationships (Marsden and Campbell 1984).”
Blind forces (2014, background): “…‘‘blurs the boundaries between the self and others and, as a result can lead individuals to experience and behave more consistently with’’ the other, including experiencing cognitive dissonance and vicariously justifying the other’s and one’s own unethical actions (Gino & Galinsky, 2012, p. 17).”
An Integrative Approach to Understanding Counterproductive Work Behavior: The Roles of Stressors, Negative Emotions, and Moral Disengagement (2014, background): “…inwhichmisconduct is frequently enacted through moral-cognitive distortions without being sanctioned may in turn promote a ‘‘morally disengaged culture’’ in which these mechanisms can be socialized, learned, and activated, facilitating recourse to CWB (Farnese et al. 2011; Gino and Galinsky 2012).”
“I Identify with Her,” “I Identify with Him”: Unpacking the Dynamics of Personal Identification in Organizations (2016, background): “For example,Gino and Galinsky (2012) found that individuals who feel “psychologically close” to a person who behaves selfishly or dishonestly are more likely to behave similarly themselves, while Becker et al. (1996) found that internalization of a supervisor’s presumably pro-organizational values…”
Unethical use of wildlife in tourism: what's the problem, who is responsible, and what can be done? (2017, background): “…of tourists on a given day, and the behaviour of others, particularly in groups can affect peoples’ moral actions (Gino, Ayal, & Ariely, 2009; Gino & Galinsky, 2012): the presence of crowds of attendees, or the sight of busloads of tourists heading off to a WTA, may provide a tacit…”
Understanding ordinary unethical behavior: why people who value morality act immorally (2015, unknown): “For instance, sharing the same birthday of a person who cheated leads us to cheat as well [27].”