High stakes: a little more cheating, a lot less charity

Zoe Rahwan, Oliver Hauser, Ewa Kochanowska and Barbara Fasolo

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We explore the downstream consequences of cheating–and resisting the temptation to cheat–at high stakes on pro-social behaviour and self-perceptions. In a large online sample, we replicate the seminal finding that cheating rates are largely insensitive to stake size, even at a 500-fold increase. We present two new findings. First, resisting the temptation to cheat at high stakes led to negative moral spill-over, triggering a moral license: participants who resisted cheating in the high stakes condition subsequently donated a smaller fraction of their earnings to charity. Second, participants who cheated maximally mispredicted their perceived morality: although such participants thought they were less prone to feeling immoral if they cheated, they ended up feeling more immoral a day after the cheating task than immediately afterwards. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings on moral balancing and self-deception, and the practical relevance for organisational design.

Keywords: Cheating; Incentives; Moral licensing; Moral self-perceptions; Pro-social behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-08-01
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Published in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 1, August, 2018, 152, pp. 276-295. ISSN: 0167-2681

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Journal Article: High stakes: A little more cheating, a lot less charity (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:89057

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