When Lying Feels the Right Thing to Do.

Fraud is a pervasive and challenging problem that costs society large amounts of money. By no means all fraud is committed by 'professional criminals': much is done by ordinary people who indulge in small-scale opportunistic deception. In this paper, we set out to investigate when people behave dishonestly, for example by committing fraud, in an online context. We conducted three studies to investigate how the rejection of one's efforts, operationalized in different ways, affected the amount of cheating and information falsification. Study 1 demonstrated that people behave more dishonestly when rejected. Studies 2 and 3 were conducted in order to disentangle the confounding factors of the nature of the rejection and the financial rewards that are usually associated with dishonest behavior. It was demonstrated that rejection in general, rather than the nature of a rejection, caused people to behave more dishonestly. When a rejection was based on subjective grounds, dishonest behavior increased with approximately 10%, but this difference was not statistically significant. We subsequently measured whether dishonesty was driven by the financial loss associated with rejection, or emotional factors such as a desire for revenge. We found that rejected participants were just as dishonest when their cheating did not led to financial gain. However, they felt stronger emotions when there was no money involved. This seems to suggest that upon rejection, emotional involvement, especially a reduction in happiness, drives dishonest behavior more strongly than a rational cost-benefit analysis. These results indicate that rejection causes people to behave more dishonestly, specifically in online settings. Firms wishing to deter customers and employees from committing fraud may therefore benefit from transparency and clear policy guidelines, discouraging people to submit claims that are likely to be rejected

The mediating role of discrete emotions in the relationship between injustice and counterproductive work behaviors:a study in Pakistan

Purpose: Our study explores the mediating role of discrete emotions in the relationships between employee perceptions of distributive and procedural injustice, regarding an annual salary raise, and counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs). Design/Methodology/Approach: Survey data were provided by 508 individuals from telecom and IT companies in Pakistan. Confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modeling, and bootstrapping were used to test our hypothesized model. Findings: We found a good fit between the data and our tested model. As predicted, anger (and not sadness) was positively related to aggressive CWBs (abuse against others and production deviance) and fully mediated the relationship between perceived distributive injustice and these CWBs. Against predictions, however, neither sadness nor anger was significantly related to employee withdrawal. Implications: Our findings provide organizations with an insight into the emotional consequences of unfair HR policies, and the potential implications for CWBs. Such knowledge may help employers to develop training and counseling interventions that support the effective management of emotions at work. Our findings are particularly salient for national and multinational organizations in Pakistan. Originality/Value: This is one of the first studies to provide empirical support for the relationships between in/justice, discrete emotions and CWBs in a non-Western (Pakistani) context. Our study also provides new evidence for the differential effects of outward/inward emotions on aggressive/passive CWBs

Social class and ideologies of inequality:How they uphold unequal societies

This research was partly supported by grant No. PSI2013-45678P, from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación) to the first author.Many societies are becoming increasingly unequal, especially after the Great Recession. This is occurring despite the evidence showing that economic inequality undermines personal and social wellbeing, and that inequality impairs the safe functioning of our societies. Although the main known causes of economic inequality are macro‐economic, some psychosocial factors can contribute to maintain it; these factors are the focus of this paper. Study 1 shows that feeling higher class and justifying the economic system increase the perception that the actual resource distribution is fair, and this in turn reduces the extent to which people see their society as unequal; effectively, social class and system justification blind people to inequality. Study 2 goes beyond blinded inequality to examine beliefs that oppose wealth redistribution. Both economic system justification (ESJ) and social dominance orientation (SDO) beliefs deepen inequality: People with strong ESJ or SDO tend not to endorse governmental and nongovernmental activities that reduce inequality. Further, these effects were mediated by a belief in dispositional poverty (i.e., internal causes for being poor). Combined, these studies highlight the importance of beliefs about social standing (subjective SES) and, especially, of ideology regarding the organization of society (ESJ, SDO) in maintaining and deepening levels of inequality.PostprintPeer reviewe

Assessments of Environmental Injustice among Black Americans

The greater exposure of communities of color and poor communities to environmental harms compared with white and middle-class neighborhoods constitutes environmental injustice. Here, we examine how environmental attitudes and experiences with discrimination, as well as environmental and racial identities, affect environmental injustice assessments. Specifically, we focus on environmental injustice pertaining to actual distributions of environmental harms among low-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color (distributive environmental injustice), and prescriptions regarding fair decision-making procedures underlying the distribution of environmental burdens in communities (procedural environmental justice). Our data stem from a survey of black people living in the United States. Seemingly unrelated regression analyses indicate that environmental attitudes influence assessments of injustice regarding the distribution of environmental harms in disadvantaged neighborhoods and prescriptions regarding just decision-making procedures about distributing such harms. And while experiences with discrimination only affect assessments of distributive environmental injustice, black identity strongly predicts both forms of justice related to the environment (even controlling on environmental identity, which only affects procedural environmental justice prescriptions). Our discussion focuses on the profound impact of black identity on shaping meanings of environmental justice even for those unaffected by such harms

Framing and Feeling Fuel Environmentally Responsible Behaviors of Black Residents in the United States

Scholars have long investigated factors contributing to enactment of environmentally responsible behaviors (ERBs), largely among white populations. Although research has debunked the myth that black people express less environmental concern, few studies examine what influences their pro-environmental behavior. We focus on how the cognitively oriented cultural frames of environmentalism and environmental justice combine with overlooked emotions to shape ERBs reported by a nationally representative sample of 988 black residents in the United States. Results indicate that the environmentalism frame, indicated by environmental identity but not attitudes, enhances all the behaviors examined: general conservation, cost-saving conservation, recycling, and advocacy. Effects of environmental justice, however, are more limited. Passion for environmental protection likewise positively affects all pro-environmental actions, and moral outrage over the condition of the environment exerts strong positive effects on conservation and advocacy. In highlighting the role of emotions in conjunction with cultural frames on ERBs, new avenues for research emerge