Rachel Barkan

Self-Serving Justifications Doing Wrong and Feeling Moral

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.

Testing servers' roles as experts and managers of tipping behaviour

This article studies the ability of servers to predict their own tips. A distinction is made between the two roles of servers with regard to tipping behaviour: the role of expert and the role of manager. As experts, servers understand the relations between several predictors and tip size, and are able to predict the tip they are about to receive. As managers, servers designate certain tip amounts, and then manage the service encounter so that their predictions are realised. This study maps the necessary conditions for an expert position and outlines the process for managing a service encounter. Empirical testing suggests that servers have an impressive predictive ability. The findings also offer some support to the view of the role of the server as manager.

Three Principles to REVISE People's Unethical Behavior

Dishonesty and unethical behavior are widespread in the public and private sectors and cause immense annual losses. For instance, estimates of U.S. annual losses indicate

Context effects and models of preferential choice: implications for consumer behavior

1 trillion paid in bribes,

Contrast effects or loss aversion? Comment on Usher and McClelland (2004).

270 billion lost due to unreported income, and

Tip policy, visibility and quality of service in cafés

42 billion lost in retail due to shoplifting and employee theft. In this article, we draw on insights from the growing fields of moral psychology and behavioral ethics to present a three-principle framework we call REVISE. This framework classifies forces that affect dishonesty into three main categories and then redirects those forces to encourage moral behavior. The first principle, reminding, emphasizes the effectiveness of subtle cues that increase the salience of morality and decrease people’s ability to justify dishonesty. The second principle, visibility, aims to restrict anonymity, prompt peer monitoring, and elicit responsible norms. The third principle, self-engagement, increases people’s motivation to maintain a positive self-perception as a moral person and helps bridge the gap between moral values and actual behavior. The REVISE framework can guide the design of policy interventions to defeat dishonesty.

Using a signal detection safety model to simulate managerial expectations and supervisory feedback

The article summarizes extant research on context effects and choice theories in a straightforward fashion. The context effects are used as benchmarks to compare six choice theories. The context effects include similarity, attraction, compromise, and reference point effects. The considered theories include simple scalability model, random utility model, elimination by aspects model, strategy switching models, componential context model, and connectionist network model of choice. The article discusses the implications of each model for consumer behavior, and suggests that the choice of model should depend on the characteristics of products, consumers and purchase process.

The impact of hotel social events on employee satisfaction: a case study.

M. Usher and J. L. McClelland (2004) recently proposed a new connectionist type of model to explain context effects on preferential choice including the similarity, attraction, and compromise effects. They compared their model with an earlier connectionist type model for these same effects proposed by R. Roe, J. R. Busemeyer, and J. T. Townsend (2001) and raised several new issues. The authors address these issues and point out the main theoretical differences between the 2 explanations for context effects.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black: Distancing Response to Ethical Dissonance

This research studied the effect of tip policy and visibility on service quality in cafés. Applying social dilemma research to cafés suggests that service quality may be deteriorated by two types of free-riding behaviour. These free-riding behaviours include reduced-effort activities and the overuse of limited common resources. The theoretical framework implies that it is difficult to solve both problems simultaneously. For example, an individual tip policy can solve the problem of reduced effort as it motivates each server to work for his or her own tip. However, this policy intensifies the competition between the servers over limited common resources. Shared tip policy operates in the opposite way, solving the latter problem yet intensifying the former. Similarly, visibility conditions (moderating monitoring and social comparison) affect the two free-riding behaviours in opposite ways. Two field studies indicated that tip policy and visibility were interacting and that quality service could be attained with two combinations. Individual tip policy leads to quality service when combined with low visibility. Shared tip policy leads to quality service when combined with high visibility. The findings demonstrate the difficulty, but also the potential of generalizing social dilemma research to natural settings.

Modeling dynamic inconsistency with a changing reference point

Abstract The present work studied a basic discrimination task that underlies many safety problems (such as hazard identification and supervisory inspection). The experimental task required decision-makers to discriminate between two classes of stimuli representing hazardous and secure cues in the environment. Errors in which decision-makers failed to identify hazardous cues were defined as risky errors. The payoff for risky errors was probabilistic. Some risky errors went unnoticed (representing lucky outcome of near accidents). Other risky errors resulted in penalty (representing damage incurred by an accident). The discrimination task was modeled utilizing Signal Detection Theory. A Cutoff Reinforcement Learning model provided predictions for choice behavior. Two controlled experiments are reported here. Experiment 1 manipulated the payoff for unnoticed risky errors. This manipulation was suggested as an analogy to different levels of the conflict between safety and productivity. Experiment 2 tested the effect of outcome feedback and cognitive feedback for risky errors. This manipulation was suggested as an analogy to supervisory feedback. The results of the two experiments showed that the simplified experimental conditions were sufficient to induce risky behavior. The findings also suggested some ways to reduce risk taking. The Cutoff Reinforcement Learning model’s predictions captured most of the findings. The paper discusses the theoretical implications of the findings and their relevance for safety research.