PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

We report two experimental studies testing how a cognitive feeling of similarity affects dishonesty in individual and collaborative tasks when cheating hurts others. By employing a novel die-in-the-box paradigm with a total of 1080 subjects, we find that a sense of similarity (vs. dissimilarity) tends to increase dishonesty in settings highlighting the relationship with a collaborator, but tends to decrease dishonesty in settings highlighting the relationship with others who suffer from cheating. Corroborating these results, a code of conduct highlighting similarity towards the firm's employees leads to higher levels of cheating than a code of conduct highlighting similarity towards other members of the society. The results provide insights into how to craft effective organizational codes of ethical conduct. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.