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Good people do bad things: How anxiety promotes unethical behavior through intuitive and automatic processing

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Abstract

Although researchers have found that emotions affect unethical behavior, few studies have uncovered the mechanism between anxiety and unethical behavior. The present study investigated how anxiety might influence unethical behavior based on the dual-process theory. In Experiment 1, a recall writing task was used to induce anxiety, and unethical behavior was assessed during an Interaction Task. Results showed that compared with participants who felt neutral emotions, those who felt anxiety were more likely to act unethically. In Experiment 2, we induced emotions by having participants watch videos and measured unethical behavior through a visual perception task. The results replicated findings in Experiment 1 and found that intuitive and automatic processing mediated the relationship between anxiety and unethical behavior. Collectively, our work reveals that anxiety might increase unethical behavior because individuals who feel anxious are more likely to engage in intuitive automatic processing that shifts attention from moral standards to self-interest, and thus to behave unethically. Both theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

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Acknowledgements

The present research was supported by The Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31200795), Project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 16CGL044) and self-determined research funds of CCNU from the colleges’ basic research and operation of MOE (Grant No. CCNU14Z02015).

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Author notes

  1. Hui Zhang and Yanwei Shi authors contributed equally to this work.

  2. Hui Zhang and Yanwei Shi joint as first authors.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Psychology, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Hui Zhang, Yanwei Shi, Hongyu Ma & Hanying Tang

  2. Key Laboratory of Adolescent Cyberpsychology and Behavior(CCNU), Ministry of Education, Wuhan, 430079, China

    Hui Zhang, Yanwei Shi, Hongyu Ma & Hanying Tang

  3. School of Psychology, Florida Institute of Technology, 150 West University Blvd., Melbourne, FL, USA

    Zhiqing E. Zhou

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  1. Hui Zhang
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Correspondence to Hongyu Ma.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Zhang, H., Shi, Y., Zhou, Z.E. et al. Good people do bad things: How anxiety promotes unethical behavior through intuitive and automatic processing. Curr Psychol 39, 720–728 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-018-9789-7

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