EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The Effects of Thought Suppression on Ethical Decision Making: Mental Rebound Versus Ego Depletion

Kai Chi Yam ()
Additional contact information
Kai Chi Yam: National University of Singapore

Journal of Business Ethics, 2018, vol. 147, issue 1, No 6, 65-79

Abstract: Abstract Although thought suppression is a commonly used self-control strategy that has far-reaching consequences, its effect on ethical decision making is unclear. Whereas ironic process theory suggests that suppressing ethics-related thoughts leads to mental rebounds of ethicality and decreased unethical behavior, ego depletion theory suggests that thought suppression can lead to reduced self-control and increased unethical behavior. Integrating the two theories, I propose that the effect of thought suppression on unethical behavior hinges on the content of the suppressed thoughts. Participants who suppressed ethics-related [-unrelated] thoughts engaged in less [more] cyber bullying (Experiment 1), cheating (Experiments 2–3), and dishonesty (Experiment 4) compared to participants in the control conditions. Explicit (Experiment 3) and implicit (Experiment 4) moral awareness was found to mediate this moderated effect. Experiment 4 further demonstrated that suppressing ethics-related thoughts reduces self-control performance on a subsequent amoral task, but not on subsequent ethical decision making.

Keywords: Thought suppression; Ego depletion; Ironic process; Behavioral ethics; Moral awareness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10551-015-2944-2 Abstract (text/html)
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:kap:jbuset:v:147:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-015-2944-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10551/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10551-015-2944-2

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Ethics is currently edited by Michelle Greenwood and R. Edward Freeman

More articles in Journal of Business Ethics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:kap:jbuset:v:147:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1007_s10551-015-2944-2