When and Why Do Ripple Effects of Dishonesty Occur?

Although organizations devote plenty of resources to promoting high ethical standards, little is known about how individuals behave when they experience deception in these environments. This study employs laboratory experiments to investigate the role of a range of situational and dispositional factors for ripple effects of dishonesty. We find that victims of lies are more likely to pay lies forward when they expected to receive a true message and when they have a weaker emotional regard for protecting the value of truthfulness. Furthermore, we find that individuals who pay forward deceptive communication appear to be acting on their emotions. Age, but not gender, plays a major role in the general pattern observed in this study, as only relatively young participants pay lies forward. Overall, our results suggest that positive beliefs about others’ behavior can have unintended consequences when such expectations are not met.