Communication increases collaborative corruption

Abstract

Despite being a pivotal aspect of human cooperation, only a few studies within the field of collaborative dishonesty have included communication between participants, and none have yet experimentally compared this to non-communicative contexts. As a result, the impact of communication on unethical collaborations remains unclear. To address this gap, we conducted two well-powered studies (Ntotal = 1187), closely replicating and extending seminal research by Weisel and Shalvi (2015), introducing communication as a manipulated variable within a dyadic cheating task. Across both studies, we found evidence that communication increases the magnitude of cheating—even when coordination on the task is not allowed. Importantly, the effect of communication was linked to a stronger experienced collaboration among the communicating dyads, highlighting that communication is not only key to everyday ethically sound collaborations, but also to corrupt collaborations.