Self-interest Bias Research Articles

Hypocrisy moderates self-interest bias in moral character judgments

ABSTRACT Self-interest bias describes an observer’s tendency to judge moral transgression leniently when they benefit from it. However, what factors moderate the self-interest bias is an open empirical question. Here, we investigated to what extent hypocrisy moderates the self-interest bias. Preregistered Study 1a (N = 194) and replication in Study 1b (N = 193) demonstrated that observers’ interest impacts moral character judgments of hypocritical transgressors. This effect was explained by observers’ goal attainment due to transgression (Study 2, N = 713) and agreement to aid observers’ or ingroup interests (Study 3, N = 634). Importantly, transgressors’ hypocrisy moderated the impact of observers’ interests in moral character judgments (Studies 2 & 3). In summary, when judging hypocritical transgressors, peoples’ moral character judgments tend to be biased by their or their group’s interests. However, in comparison to non-hypocritical transgressors, this impact is less pronounced.

Self-Interest Bias in the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Cultural Comparison between the United States and China

In the global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries attempt to enforce new social norms to prevent the further spread of the coronavirus. A key to the success of these measures is the individual adherence to norms that are collectively beneficial to contain the spread of the pandemic. However, individuals’ self-interest bias (i.e., the prevalent tendency to license own but not others’ self-serving acts or norm violations) can pose a challenge to the success of such measures. The current research examines COVID-19-related self-interest bias from a cross-cultural perspective. Two studies ( N = 1,558) sampled from the United States and China consistently revealed that participants from the United States evaluated their own self-serving acts (exploiting test kits in Study 1; social gathering and sneezing without covering the mouth in public in Study 2) as more acceptable than identical deeds of others, while such self-interest bias did not emerge among Chinese participants. Cultural underpinnings of independent versus interdependent self-construal may influence the extent to which individuals apply self-interest bias to justifications of their own self-serving behaviors during the pandemic.

Dichotomous Thinking and Ethical Consumerism: Overcoming the Negative Effects of Self-Interest Bias through Third-Person Narrative Persuasion

The authors examine consumer attitudes toward ethically labeled products and demonstrate that consumers who think dichotomously tend to favor their own self-interests over the social good by choosing mainstream noncertified products over products displaying ethical labels such as fair trade and Fair Wear. The authors further suggest that advertisers can use a third-person perspective to attenuate the negative effects of dichotomous thinking, increase purchase intentions, and encourage consumption of ethically certificated products. Findings from five studies on various ethically labeled products (such as food and clothing) with a diverse group of study participants (American consumers from a popular tourist spot, an online panel, and college students) provided convergent evidence supporting the hypotheses. Theoretical contributions and implications for marketers, policymakers, and consumers are addressed.

For the love of football?

Summary Using data for a large sample of German football referees, we studied the motives for becoming a football referee. Based on a long modelling tradition in the literature on the economics of volunteering, we studied altruistic motives (public-goods model) versus non-altruistic (egoistic private-consumption and human-capital) motives. We differentiated between self-attributed and other-attributed motives. We found that altruistic motives on average are less strong than other motives. Other-attributed altruistic motives are stronger than self-attributed altruistic motives, indicating the presence of a self-interest bias. We further found that referees who report strong altruistic motives have a higher willingness to quit refereeing when other referees would referee more matches, consistent with the public-goods model. In line with the human-capital model, altruistic motives are stronger for senior referees. Altruistic motives are also stronger for those referees who view refereeing as a volunteer activity.

Self-Interest Bias in Moral Judgments of Others' Actions.

The automatic and affective nature of moral judgments leads to the expectation that these judgments are biased by an observer's own interests. Although the idea of self-interest bias is old, it has never been directly tested with respect to the moral judgments of other individuals' behaviors. The participants of three experiments observed other individuals' counternormative behavior (breaking a rule or cheating for gain), which was judged as immoral. However, this judgment became much more lenient when the observers gained from the observed behavior. All three studies showed that the influence of self-interest on moral judgments was completely mediated by the observer's increased liking for the perpetrator of the immoral acts but not by changes in mood. When the participants were induced to dislike the perpetrator (in a moderation-of-process design), the self-interest bias disappeared. Implications for the intuitionist approach to moral judgment are discussed.

Unawareness of Self-interest Bias in Moral Judgments of Others’ Behavior

Unawareness of Self-interest Bias in Moral Judgments of Others’ Behavior

Perceptions of Price Fairness

This article researches factors that influence price fairness judgments. The empirical literature suggests several factors: reference prices, the costs of the seller, a self-interest bias, and the perceived motive of sellers. Using a Dutch sample, we find empirical evidence that these factors significantly affect perceptions of fair prices. In addition, we find that the perceived fairness of prices is also influenced by other distributional concerns that are independent of the transaction. In particular, price increases are judged to be fairer if they benefit poor people or small organizations rather than rich people or big organizations.

The pursuit of self-interest: Self-interest bias in attitude judgment and persuasion.

Self-interest affected the direction of attitudes in 4 studies exploring attitude judgment and persuasion. Experiment 1 showed that both self-interest and symbolic concerns predicted attitudes. The biasing role of self-interest in producing the well-known persuasion effects of personal relevance and argument strength was examined by disentangling the competing effects of personal costs and benefits. Experiment 2 used a standard personal relevance manipulation in the absence of supportive arguments and showed that perceptions of personal costs associated with the advocated policy partially mediated its negative effects on attitudes. Experiments 3 and 4 independently manipulated the onset of personal costs associated with an issue and the onset of issue-related benefits conveyed by supportive arguments. Postmessage attitudes were an additive function of personal costs and argument-specified benefits, and perceived costs and benefits biased information processing in a self-interested manner. A revised conception of personal relevance and argument strength is discussed.

Opportunity Knocks: Perceptions of Fairness in Employee Benefits

This article considers potential conflicts between the principles of equity, equality and need in perceptions of fairness regarding employee benefits, based on self-interest bias, and makes specific predictions regarding perceptions of distributive justice in specific benefit plans. It includes predictions regarding perceptions of procedural justice. A survey of 497 employees in seven Canadian organizations tested the predictions. Findings indicate that need is still an important criterion for assessing distributive justice in employee benefits, although the survey also found evidence of self-interest bias. Perceptions of procedural justice were found to be significantly higher in plans with extensive communication and employee participation in plan design. Organizations that take a proactive approach to understanding how employees determine their perceptions of procedural and distributive justice in employee benefits, and design a benefit plan accordingly, can potentially increase employees’ perceptions of justice regarding employee benefits and reap associated benefits including improved employee retention, enhanced ability to hire and increased benefit satisfaction.

Performance-based pay is fair, particularly when I perform better: differential fairness perceptions of allocators and recipients

We examined in two experiments the impact of the roles that people enact (allocator or recipient) and performance attributions (talent or effort) on fairness perceptions of pay systems (performance-based pay or job-based pay). To test the relative effects of the roles that people enact, in the control conditions, participants were asked to evaluate the fairness of both allocation norms from ‘behind a veil of ignorance’ (Rawls, 1971). As hypothesized, the results consistently demonstrate that whereas recipients were biased in their fairness perceptions, allocators tended to be non-biased in their fairness perceptions. The self-interest bias among recipients was particularly strong when talent rather than effort attributions were imposed on them. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

New Black-White Patterns: How Best to Conceptualize Them?

Black-white relations have changed sharply in recent years. But no overarching sociological perspective has emerged to explain these changes. Many ideas with contrasting conceptualizations have been advanced, however. This chapter uncovers empirical agreements across these rival theoretical positions. At the structural level, race and class studies appear to converge on an interactional position—one that emphasizes the importance of both race and class factors as well as their interactions. A parallel convergence is emerging at the social psychological level. Though increasingly ambivalent and indirect, racist attitudes remain important; but racism must now be placed in a wider context of subjective self-interest, stratification beliefs, and cognitive bias. Hence, the causal complexity and indirectness of modern race relations are repeatedly shown in current research at both the macro- and microlevels. Closer attention to this emerging empirical convergence would further the needed theoretical convergence. The chapter closes with calls for more attention to black American responses and to the links between the macro- and microlevels of analysis.