USC Marshall

Management scholars have typically regarded the widespread instances of hypocrisy across business, religious, and political institutions to be motivated and strategic. We suggest, however, that hypocrisy may stem not only from people’s motivation to interpret and utilize information in a self-serving manner, but also from fundamental differences in people’s access to that information itself. More specifically, we present a multi-stage Theory of Ethical Accounting (TEA) that describes how this differential access to information, specifically about the self vs. others, can create an interrelated series of cognitive distortions in how people account for the same unethical behavior. TEA posits that such distortions can allow people to believe they are being fair and consistent when appraising the morality of the self and others, while actually being inconsistent in how they do so, and describes how this can ultimately make it harder to address not only hypocrisy but unethical behavior more broadly in organizations.

Although past research has offered important insights into the ways in which people attempt to manage their moral character, that work has typically presumed that the kinds of inferences people make about a target would involve the aggregation of essentially static interpretations of that party’s discrete acts. The present research reveals, however, that such interpretations are often far from static, and that they can actually be altered far more than people realize as new events unfold. More specifically, through four empirical studies, we find that: a) people may discount the diagnosticity of an actor’s initial deed if that party commits a subsequent act of the opposite valence, b) this is more likely to occur when a prior good deed is followed by a bad deed than when a prior good deed is followed by a good deed, c) this occurs to a greater degree when evaluating the actions of others than the self, and d) this can ultimately produce divergent perceptions of the target’s overall morality, evaluations of that party’s trustworthiness, and expectations for trusting behaviors.

Intelligent tutoring systems have proven very effective at teaching hard skills such as math and science, but less research has examined how to teach “soft” skills such as negotiation. In this paper, we introduce an effective approach to teaching negotiation tactics. Prior work showed that students can improve through practice with intelligent negotiation agents. We extend this work by proposing general methods of assessment and feedback that could be applied to a variety of such agents. We evaluate these techniques through a human subject study. Our study demonstrates that personalized feedback improves students’ use of several foundational tactics.

Mistrust is a daily occurrence at work. Yet little is known about how perceptions of being mistrusted by coworkers may affect employees’ subsequent daily attitudes and behaviors. Indeed, the existing literature on mistrust has overwhelmingly focused on how mistrust affects the trustor (person whose trust is violated) but not the trustee (the mistrusted person). This is problematic because conservation of resources theory (COR) suggests that perceived mistrust is a negative experience likely to affect the mistrusted employees’ subsequent attitudes and behaviors both at work and at home. To investigate this possibility, we conducted an experience sampling study of employees and their significant others over three consecutive workweeks. Consistent with COR, day by day perceptions of mistrust increased employees’ emotional exhaustion, consequently leading to withdrawal from colleagues at work and conflict toward their significant other at home. Moreover, supporting self-enhancement (rather than self-verification) theory, these effects were stronger when employees perceived mistrust to be high (vs. low) in justification. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of this research.