Shifting Morals: How Stakes Shape Moralized Decision-Making

Abstract: Morally-laden decisions are influenced by personal motivations (i.e., ethical considerations and self-interest) and impression management. While individuals often hope to satisfy both aspects, they may conflict as the stakes of the context vary. Five symposium papers explore how incentives and reputational concerns shift decision-making. First, Zaw, Kirgios, and O’Brien demonstrate that evaluators’ preference for those who overcame adversity and effortfully improved decreases from low-stakes to high-stakes hiring decisions, disadvantaging adversity candidates from “moving up the ladder.” Second, Wu and Belmi show that first-generation students, associated with heroic traits, are more likely to be assigned low-status, unpaid work, revealing a negative consequence of positive stereotypes. Third, Xu, Goya-Tocchetto, and Munguia Gomez find that candidates from low socioeconomic backgrounds are less likely to be hired, but explicitly linking their socioeconomic background with their achievement reduces this bias. Fourth, Smith, Kirgios, Chang, and Silver find a gap between privately endorsed and publicly communicated diversity goals for historically marginalized groups, suggesting that a high-stakes context heightens reputational concerns. Finally, Jordan, Abdurahman, Omrani, Dehghani, and Kteily show that on social media, severe condemnation of wrongdoing increases reinforcement but receives less approval, suggesting that misperceived reputational motives can lead to pluralistic ignorance. Overall, these papers reveal how morally valenced decision-making in organizations differs across stakes and is shaped by people’s differential weighting of personal motivation and impression management considerations. These decisions carry implications for fairness as well as diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Keywords: stakes; morality; diversity; experiments