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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Blame The Shepherd Not The Sheep: Imitating Higher-Ranking Transgressors Mitigates Punishment For Unethical Behavior, Christopher W. Bauman, Leigh Plunkett Tost, Ong, Madeline Nov 2016

Blame The Shepherd Not The Sheep: Imitating Higher-Ranking Transgressors Mitigates Punishment For Unethical Behavior, Christopher W. Bauman, Leigh Plunkett Tost, Ong, Madeline

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Do bad role models exonerate others’ unethical behavior? Based on social learning theory and psychologicaltheories of blame, we predicted that unethical behavior by higher-ranking individuals changes howpeople respond to lower-ranking individuals who subsequently commit the same transgression. Fivestudies explored when and why this rank-dependent imitation effect occurs. Across all five studies, wefound that people were less punitive when low-ranking transgressors imitated high-ranking membersof their organization. However, imitation only reduced punishment when the two transgressors werefrom the same organization (Study 2), when the transgressions were highly similar (Study 3), and whenit was unclear whether the initial transgressor was punished (Study 5). …


What Makes Professors Credible: The Effect Of Demographic Characteristics And Ideological Beliefs, Luke Zhu, Karl Aquino, Abhijeet K. Vadera Jun 2016

What Makes Professors Credible: The Effect Of Demographic Characteristics And Ideological Beliefs, Luke Zhu, Karl Aquino, Abhijeet K. Vadera

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Five studies are conducted to examine how ideology and perceptions regarding gender, race, caste, and affiliation status affect how individuals judge researchers' credibility. Support is found for predictions that individuals judge researcher credibility according to their egalitarian or elitist ideologies and according to status cues including race, gender, caste, and university affiliation. Egalitarians evaluate low-status researchers as more credible than high-status researchers. Elitists show the opposite pattern. Credibility judgments affect whether individuals will interpret subsequent ambiguous events in accordance with the researcher's findings. Effects of diffuse status cues and ideological beliefs may be mitigated when specific status cues are presented …