Stranger Danger: When and Why Consumer Dyads Behave Less Ethically Than Individuals

Hristina Nikolova, Cait Lamberton, Nicole Verrochi Coleman, Vicki MorwitzEditor and Stijn van OsselaerAssociate Editor

Journal of Consumer Research, 2018, vol. 45, issue 1, 90-108

Abstract: While joint ethical violations are fairly common in the marketplace and in workplace, sports-team, and academic settings, little research has studied such collaborative wrongdoings. This work compares the joint ethical decisions of pairs of people (i.e., dyads) to those of individual decision makers. Four experiments demonstrate that dyads in which the partners do not share a social bond with each other behave less ethically than individuals do. The authors propose that this effect occurs because joint ethical violations offer a means to socially bond with others. Consistent with this theory, they demonstrate that the dyads’ subethicality relative to individuals is attenuated (1) if the dyad partners establish rapport prior to the joint decision making, and (2) in decision-making contexts in which social bonding goals are less active—namely, making a decision with an out-group versus in-group member. Taken together, this research provides novel theoretical insights into the social aspects of unethical behavior, offers suggestions to improve ethicality in joint decisions, and raises important questions for future research.

Keywords: unethical decisions; cheating; ethical; dyads; joint decision making; social bonding (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/jcr/ucx108 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:jconrs:v:45:y:2018:i:1:p:90-108.

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Consumer Research is currently edited by Bernd Schmitt, June Cotte, Markus Giesler, Andrew Stephen and Stacy Wood

More articles in Journal of Consumer Research from Journal of Consumer Research Inc.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().