For people who are driven to succeed at a certain profession, negative feedback about their talent or potential may lead some to act unethically.
“Strongly held professional goals, when combined with public criticism of our potential in that field, can have unintended effects on ethical behavior for some,” says Ana Gantman, a doctoral candidate at New York University (NYU) and one of the paper’s authors.
It’s long been known that we have identity-related goals with regard to professional pursuits—to become a well-regarded lawyer, doctor, or scientist, for instance. Research in this area, known as identity goal pursuit, shows that when we receive negative feedback about our potential, we respond by compensating—trying to show that we are very similar to successful members of that group.
Less clear, however, is how negative feedback may even prompt compensation in the form of questionable professional conduct. To explore this dynamic, researchers conducted three experiments with students intending to enter business, law, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields.
In the first experiment, business students took a mock aptitude test, which purported to measure their potential in the field. Some were told they performed well on the exam and others that they did poorly. The participants were then asked to indicate how they would respond to multiple scenarios; for instance, whether they would break a contractual agreement in order to increase profit margin—an action that an additional group of participants had seen as “immoral.”
