Abstract

Both the popular press and the academic community agree that there is a tremendous need for the study of ethics. While there has been a significant amount of important research addressing the philosophy of ethics, there has been very little behavioral research focused on empirically understanding unethical behavior. It is argued that to advance the field of ethics, it is important to study factors that might influence one's decision to behave unethically. ;The premise of this dissertation is that an individual's decision to behave unethically is influenced by the situation, and in particular, by the justifications available to the decision maker. Justifications may be related to unethical behavior in two ways. First, justifications may drive unethical behavior such that the more justified a given unethical behavior is, the more likely it will be that individuals will engage in that behavior. Alternatively, the more individuals desire to engage in a given unethical behavior, the more they may distort their environment in order to justify this desire. This paper investigates the relationship between unethical behavior and two sources of justifications--the expectations of others' unethical behavior and uncertainty. ;Results suggest that the justifications of others' unethical behavior and uncertainty were related to one's desire and decision to engage in misrepresentation. Individuals who had a higher monetary incentive to misrepresent their information were more likely to engage in misrepresentation and to believe that others would also behave unethically. It is argued that individuals distort their perceptions of others' behavior in order to justify their desire to behave unethically. It was also found that individuals engaged in distortions concerning perceptions of ethicality, exhibiting positive illusions about their own ethicality and negative illusions about their opponent's ethicality. ;An individual's misrepresentation was also found to be influenced by the uncertainty of one's opponent. The more uncertain the individual's opponent was about the individual's information, the more likely that individual was to engage in misrepresentation. It is argued that uncertainty provides an individual with several potential justifications for engaging in unethical behavior, thereby increasing its prevalence. Implications of these findings for the field of ethics are discussed