In this project, Daniel Effron and his colleagues examine a psychological process that allows people to act unethically without feeling unethical. When people reflect on the unethical road not taken - that is, the misdeeds that they refrained from committing in the past - they feel more justified in acting unethically in the future. Thus, situations that draw people's attention to these unethical roads not taken can inadvertently increase the incidence of unethical behavior. Effron and colleagues use behavioral experiments to examine this psychological process, the situations that give rise to it, and its implications for racial discrimination and conflicts of interest. Initial experiments demonstrate how passing up an opportunity to do something blatantly racist can increase people's willingness to express discriminatory hiring preferences. Ongoing research examines whether people are more likely to allow conflicts of interest to bias their judgment after they have recently passed up an opportunity to commit a more flagrant ethical violation. This project strives to shed light on when and why phenomena like these can become systemic, and what can be done to prevent that from happening.
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