Publications
Publications
Show Results For
- All HBS Web
(550)
- Faculty Publications (218)
- 2015
- Article
Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment
By: George E. Newman, Julian De Freitas and Joshua Knobe
Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about
(a) what a person values, (b) whether a person is happy, (c) whether a person has shown weakness
of will, and (d) whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend... View Details
- September 2015 (Revised January 2023)
- Background Note
Ethical Analysis: Situation versus Character
When we think of human behavior, especially from a moral perspective, we often rely on explanations based on character. We think that good decisions and responsible behavior require people with integrity and strong character and that immoral behavior originates within... View Details
- 2015
- Article
Approach, Ability, Aftermath: A Psychological Framework of Unethical Behavior at Work
By: C. Moore and F. Gino
Many of the scandalous organizational practices that have come to light in the last decade—rigging LIBOR, misselling payment protection insurance, rampant Wall Street insider trading, large-scale bribery of foreign officials, and the packaging and sale of toxic... View Details
- July 2015
- Article
The Moral Virtue of Authenticity: How Inauthenticity Produces Feelings of Immorality and Impurity
By: F. Gino, Maryam Kouchaki and Adam D. Galinsky
The current research demonstrates that authenticity is directly linked to morality. Across five experiments, we found that experiencing inauthenticity consistently led participants to feel more immoral and impure. This inauthenticity→feeling immoral link produced an... View Details
- June 2015
- Article
Understanding Ordinary Unethical Behavior: Why People Who Value Morality Act Immorally
By: F. Gino
Cheating, deception, organizational misconduct, and many other forms of unethical behavior are among the greatest challenges in today's society. As regularly highlighted by the media, extreme cases and costly scams are common. Yet, even more frequent and pervasive are... View Details
- April 2015
- Article
Self-serving Justifications: Doing Wrong and Feeling Moral
By: Shaul Shalvi, F. Gino, Rachel Barkan and Shahar Ayal
Unethical behavior by "ordinary" people poses significant societal and personal challenges. We present a novel framework centered on the role of self-serving justification to build upon and advance the rapidly expanding research on intentional unethical behavior of... View Details
- 2015
- Working Paper
Thick as Thieves? Dishonest Behavior and Egocentric Social Networks
By: Jooa Julia Lee, Dong-Kyun Im, Bidhan Parmar and Francesca Gino
People experience a threat to their moral self-concept in the face of discrepancies between their moral values and their unethical behavior. We theorize that people's need to restore their view of themselves as moral activates thoughts of a high-density personal social... View Details
- January 2015
- Article
Poker-faced Morality: Concealing Emotions Leads to Utilitarian Decision Making
By: Jooa Julia Lee and F. Gino
This paper examines how making deliberate efforts to regulate aversive affective responses influences people's decisions in moral dilemmas. We hypothesize that emotion regulation—mainly suppression and reappraisal—will encourage utilitarian choices in emotionally... View Details
- December 2014
- Article
The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty
By: Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino and Maryam Kouchaki
To create social ties to support their professional or personal goals, people actively engage in instrumental networking. Drawing from moral psychology research, we posit that this intentional behavior has unintended consequences for an individual's morality. Unlike... View Details
Keywords: Networking; Morality; Dirtiness; Power; Networks; Moral Sensibility; Identity; Power and Influence
- November 2014
- Case
Napalm: From Soldiers Field to Trang Bang
By: Tom Nicholas and Jonas Peter Akins
Napalm is one of the most destructive weapons ever to be invented. Yet, at its original inception it was nothing more than a technical challenge, and it was never intended to be used in indiscriminate antipersonnel warfare. The pathway of its development by a Harvard... View Details
- October 2014
- Case
Teckentrup: A Door to Managing Difference
By: Clayton Rose, Jerome Lenhardt and Daniela Beyersdorfer
For Kai Teckentrup, the owner and co-CEO of the German "Mittelstand" door manufacturer Teckentrup, balancing competitive pressures, demographic realities and values were at the heart of the diversity program that he had started and championed at the company. Beyond... View Details
Keywords: Diversity Management; Corporate Values; Competitiveness; Demographics; Change Management; Transformation; Diversity; Ethnicity; Gender; Literacy; Nationality; Race; Residency; Corporate Accountability; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Organizational Culture; Economic Growth; Fairness; Moral Sensibility; Values and Beliefs; Immigration; Employee Relationship Management; Civil Society or Community; Manufacturing Industry; Construction Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Europe; Germany; Russia; Turkey
- 2014
- Article
Morality Rebooted: Exploring Simple Fixes to Our Moral Bugs
Ethics research developed partly in response to calls from organizations to understand and solve unethical behavior. Departing from prior work that focused mainly on examining the antecedents and consequences of dishonesty, we examine two approaches to mitigating... View Details
Keywords: Corruption; Dishonesty; Unethical Behavior; Interventions; Structure; Values; Behavior; Ethics; Moral Sensibility
- 2014
- Article
Time, Money, and Morality
By: F. Gino and C. Mogilner
Money, a resource that absorbs much daily attention, seems to be present in much unethical behavior thereby suggesting that money itself may corrupt. This research examines a way to offset such potentially deleterious effects—by focusing on time, a resource that tends... View Details
- 2014
- Working Paper
The Contaminating Effects of Building Instrumental Ties: How Networking Can Make Us Feel Dirty
By: Tiziana Casciaro, Francesca Gino and Maryam Kouchaki
To create social ties to support their professional or personal goals, people actively engage in instrumental networking. Drawing from moral psychology research, we posit that this intentional behavior has unintended consequences for an individual's morality. Unlike... View Details
- April 2014
- Article
Evil Genius? How Dishonesty Can Lead to Greater Creativity
By: F. Gino and S. Wiltermuth
We propose that dishonest and creative behavior have something in common: they both involve breaking rules. Because of this shared feature, creativity may lead to dishonesty (as shown in prior work), and dishonesty may lead to creativity (the hypothesis we tested in... View Details
- 2014
- Article
The Burden of Guilt: Heavy Backpacks, Light Snacks, and Enhanced Morality
By: M. Kouchaki, F. Gino and A. Jami
Drawing on the embodied simulation account of emotional information processing, we argue that the physical experience of weight is associated with the emotional experience of guilt and thus that weight intensifies the experience of guilt. Across four studies, we found... View Details
- 2014
- Chapter
Corporate Social Responsibility and Multinational Corporations
By: Nien-he Hsieh and Florian Wettstein
A central question that arises from the perspective of global ethics is what standards ought to apply to the activities of multinational corporations (MNCs). This chapter surveys the contemporary theoretical literature on this question. The first section provides... View Details
- 26 Feb 2015 - 28 Feb 2015
- Conference Presentation
Is That All There Is to Happiness?
By: J. Phillips, C. Mott, Julian De Freitas, J. Gruber and J. Knobe
Happiness researchers have started to converge on a conception of
happiness that involves some combination of high positive affect,
low negative affect, and high life satisfaction. We present three
studies which demonstrate that the ordinary understanding... View Details
- 2014
- Article
Paying It Forward: Generalized Reciprocity and the Limits of Generosity
By: Kurt Gray, Adrian F. Ward and Michael I. Norton
When people are the victims of greed or recipients of generosity, their first impulse is often to pay back that behavior in kind. What happens when people cannot reciprocate, but instead have the chance to be cruel or kind to someone entirely different—to pay it... View Details
- October 2013
- Article
The Cheater's High: The Unexpected Affective Benefits of Unethical Behavior
By: N. E. Ruedy, C. Moore, F. Gino and M. Schweitzer
Many theories of moral behavior assume that unethical behavior triggers negative affect. In this paper, we challenge this assumption and demonstrate that unethical behavior can trigger positive affect, which we term a "cheater's high." Across six studies, we find that... View Details