| Summary: | Current theories of
dishonest behavior suggest that both individual profits and the availability of
justifications drive cheating. Although some evidence hints that cheating
behavior is most prevalent when both self-profit and social justifications are
present, the relative impact of each of these factors is insufficiently
understood. This study provides a fine-grained analysis of the trade-off
between self-profit versus social justifiability. In a non-student online
sample, we assessed dishonest behavior in a coin-tossing task, involving six
conditions which systematically varied both self-profit and social
justifiability (in terms of social welfare), such that a decrease in the former
was associated with the exact same increase in the latter. Results showed that
self-profit outweighed social justifiability, but that there was also an effect
of social justifications.
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