Are Privileged Individuals More Likely to Make Unethical Decisions?

Growing inequality over the past few decades has been a great problem for the
majority of Americans. Inequality is in part a reflection of privilege. The objective
of this research was to investigate the association between privilege (including
socioeconomic status or SES) and honesty (cheating behavior), along with
relationships between privilege and personality and finally personality and honesty.
This work furthered our knowledge of perceptions of social justice and the
mechanisms underlying unethical behavior. Participants completed a questionnaire
on Amazon MTurk that measured constructs of privilege (subjective SES, race,
education, occupation, gender) and unethical behavior (participants completed three
skill and chance-based tasks, each of which afforded the opportunity to report
scores honestly or dishonestly). Results did not show strong correlations between
privilege and cheating, but there was significant evidence that those high in
entitlement were most likely to cheat. Our conclusion provides further evidence of
personality’s influence on ethical behavior