Self-Serving Justifications: Doing Wrong and Feeling Moral
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Unethical behavior by “ordinary” people poses significant societal and personal challenges. We present a novel framework centered on the role of self-serving justification to build upon and advance the rapidly expanding research on intentional unethical behavior of people who value their morality highly. We propose that self-serving justifications emerging before and after people engage in intentional ethical violations mitigate the threat to the moral self, enabling them to do wrong while feeling moral. Pre-violation justifications lessen the anticipated threat to the moral self by redefining questionable behaviors as excusable. Post-violation justifications alleviate the experienced threat to the moral self through compensations that balance or lessen violations. We highlight the psychological mechanisms that prompt people to do wrong and feel moral, and suggest future research directions regarding the temporal dimension of self-serving justifications of ethical misconduct.
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Choshen‐Hillel, S., Shaw, A., & Caruso, E. M. (2020) · Journal of Experimental Psychology General · doi:10.1037/xge0000737 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
Chen, C., Qin, X., Johnson, R. E., Huang, M., Yang, M., & Liu, S. (2021) · Journal of Organizational Behavior · doi:10.1002/job.2501 · Cited by 36 · see citing works
Brooks, T., Gunning, J. G., Spillane, J. P., & Cole, J. (2021) · Construction Management and Economics · doi:10.1080/01446193.2021.1983186 · Cited by 32 · see citing works
When and Why People Evaluate Negative Reciprocity as More Fair Than Positive Reciprocity
Shaw, A., Barakzai, A., & Keysar, B. (2019) · Cognitive Science · doi:10.1111/cogs.12773 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
Why public employees manipulate performance data: prosocial impact, job stress, and red tape
Kroll, A., & Vogel, D. (2021) · International Public Management Journal · doi:10.1080/10967494.2021.1874579 · Cited by 31 · see citing works
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To Give or Not to Give? Choosing Chance Under Moral Conflict
Lin, S., & Reich, T. (2017) · Journal of Consumer Psychology · doi:10.1002/jcpy.1008 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
Common and distinct neural correlates of self‐serving and prosocial dishonesty
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Self-Compassion Relates to Reduced Unethical Behavior Through Lower Moral Disengagement
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When negotiators with honest reputations are less (and more) likely to be deceived
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The Moral Identity and Immoral Behavior
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Motivation and the Virtue of Honesty: Some Conceptual Requirements and Empirical Results
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Corruption: A cross-country comparison of contagion and conformism
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Cheating when in the hole: The case of New York city taxis
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Cheating to benefit others? On the relation between Honesty‐Humility and prosocial lies
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What Provides Justification for Cheating—Producing or Observing Counterfactuals?
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(Dis)honesty in the face of uncertain gains or losses
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Self-citationThe consequences of dishonesty
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Unethical amnesia responds more to instrumental than to hedonic motives
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Moral currencies: Explaining corrupt collaboration
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- Authors
- Shalvi, S., Gino, F., Barkan, R., & Ayal, S.
- Affiliations
- Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (IL)
- Harvard Business School, Harvard University
- Reichman University (IL)
- Venue
- Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2015-04
- Volume
- 24
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 125-130
- ISSN
- 0963-7214 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8721
- OpenAlex
- W2097587915
- Cited by
- 422
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2026: 31 · 2025: 25 · 2024: 29 · 2023: 50 · 2022: 48 · 2021: 44 · 2020: 50 · 2019: 37 · 2018: 40 · 2017: 31 · 2016: 21 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 70.12
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Current Directions in Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- European Commission (2007–2013, FP7 2007-2013, FP7/2007, 333745)
- Research Executive Agency (FP7/2007-2013)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Information Systems and Management › Ethics in Business and Education
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Emotions and Moral Behavior
- Keywords
- moral self, moral dissonance, moral licensing, moral compensation, moral self-presentation, ethical violations
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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