Six experiments examined how people strategically use thoughts of foregone misdeeds to regulate their moral behavior. We tested two hypotheses: first, that people will feel licensed to act in morally dubious ways when they can point to immoral alternatives to their prior behavior, and second,...

This paper explores the influence of social categories on the perceived trade-off between relatively bad but equal distribution of resources between two parties and profit maximizing, yet asymmetric payoffs. Study 1 and 2 showed that people prefer to maximize profits when interacting within...

Six studies explored the hypothesis that third parties are averse to resolving preference disputes with winner-take-all solutions when disputing factions belong to different social categories (e.g., gender, nationality, firms, etc.). Studies 1-3 provided empirical support for the claim that...

In a choice between equal payoffs (e.g., self gets $500/other person gets $500) and more lucrative but disadvantageously unequal payoffs (e.g., self gets $600/other person gets $800), individuals willingly trade disadvantageous inequality for extra profit (e.g., Blount and Bazerman, 1996),...

Research on the separate versus joint evaluation of payoff allocations (e.g., Bazerman, Loewenstein, & White, 1992) has found that individuals prefer an equitable allocation between themselves and another person (e.g., self-$500/other-$500) to an alternative allocation where they receive a...