Article

Over recent years, an increasing number of business and political scandals involving immoral and unethical practices have emerged, and in everyday life too, such moral trans-gressions occur frequently (see, for example, Banaji, Bazerman, & Chugh, 2003; DePaulo & Kashy, 1998). Many of such transgressions revolve around achieving larger profits or gains. This observation does not only follow from high-profile business scandals (e.g., the case of Bernard Madoff, see Kramer, 2009), but it has also been supported by experi-mental data which show that individuals are willing to engage in unethical behaviors like lying, cheating, and steal-ing when they can obtain higher payoffs by doing so (e.g.