The Role of Social Closeness in Chinese Business Students’ Ethical Judgments

Abstract

This study examines whether social closeness makes individuals milder towards peers’ unethical behavior. The results, from a sample of 118 Hong Kong Chinese and 102 Mainland Chinese students, indicate that when judging the ethicality of an act, individuals look beyond the nature of the act itself and implicitly consider their social closeness with the person performing the act. Individuals have milder ethical judgments when the person being judged is an in-group member (versus out-group member) or friend (versus stranger). In addition, individuals have milder ethical judgments when the person being judged is a friend instead of an in-group member, which suggests that as social closeness increases we become milder in our ethical judgments. To provide support that this phenomenon is primarily a product of one’s social closeness with the person to be judged and that these effects are not attributable to a subset of people who are low in moral attentiveness nor attributable to a subset of people who perceive ...