Threats to Moral Identity: Testing the Effects of Incentives and Consequences of One's Actions on Moral Cleansing.

Individuals engage in moral cleansing, a compensatory process to reaffirm one's moral identity, when one's moral self-concept is threatened. However, too much moral cleansing can license individuals to engage in future unethical acts. This study examined the effects of incentives and consequences of one's actions on cheating behavior and moral cleansing. Results found that incentives and consequences interacted such that unethical thoughts were especially threatening, resulting in more moral cleansing, when large incentives to cheat were present and cheating explicitly harmed others. Implications are discussed in terms of ethics training, using incentives as motivators, and the depersonalized norms of science.

Self-Serving Bias or Simply Serving the Self? Evidence for a Dimensional Approach to Narcissism.

Previous research has suggested that narcissism can be conceptualized as a multidimensional construct consisting of the related, but unique, dimensions of grandiosity and entitlement. The current studies examined the divergent associations of grandiosity and entitlement with respect to different types of self-serving strategies. In Study 1, we found that narcissistic grandiosity, but not entitlement, was positively associated with a self-enhancing strategy of unrealistic optimism. This association was not mediated by self-esteem. In Study 2, narcissistic entitlement, but not grandiosity, was predictive of unethical decision-making, an interpersonal self-promotional strategy that advances the self at the expense of others. Together, both studies support a model of narcissism consisting of a relatively intrapersonal dimension of grandiosity and a relatively interpersonal dimension of entitlement.

Moral Credentialing and the Rationalization of Misconduct.

Recent studies lead to the paradoxical conclusion that the act of affirming one's egalitarian or pro-social values and virtues might subsequently facilitate prejudiced or self-serving behavior, an effect previously referred to as "moral credentialing." The present study extends this paradox to the domain of academic misconduct and investigates the hypothesis that such an effect might be limited by the extent to which misbehavior is rationalizable. Using a paradigm designed to investigate deliberative and rationalized forms of cheating (von Hippel, Lakin, & Shakarchi, 2005), we found that when participants had credentialed themselves (versus a non-close acquaintance) via a set of hypothetical moral dilemmas, they were more likely to cheat on a subsequent math task, but only if cheating was highly rationalizable. When cheating was difficult to rationalize, moral credentialing had almost no impact on cheating.

On the meaning and measure of narcissism.

For three decades, social-personality research on overt narcissism has relied almost exclusively on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI). However, the NPI suffers from a host of psychometric and validity concerns that make composite NPI scores (summed across its subscales) difficult to interpret. The present studies propose that narcissistic characteristics tend to fall under two general clusters: grandiosity and entitlement. The studies show that measures of grandiosity and entitlement interact to predict scores on the NPI, controlling for gender, self-esteem, and basic personality (Study 1), but also that grandiosity and entitlement function independently with respect to mental health (Study 2) and ethical misconduct (Study 3). Together, these results challenge the view of overt narcissism as a unidimensional construct and underscore the importance of distinguishing between grandiose and entitled aspects of the narcissistic self-concept.