Shu, Gino, & Bazerman, in their article “Dishonest deed, clear conscience: When cheating leads to moral disengagement and motivated forgetting” (2011) review a series of experiments where the explored when and why people may engage in dishonest acts while experiencing little to no guilt

Shu, Gino, & Bazerman, in their article “Dishonest deed, clear conscience: When cheating leads to moral disengagement and motivated forgetting” (2011) review a series of experiments where the explored when and why people may engage in dishonest acts while experiencing little to no guilt. They make an interesting argument about how typically good and ethical individuals can still enact dishonest behaviors, and how that is related to moral disengagement. Moral disengagement, originally coined by Bandura, is the process whereby we distance ourselves from our behaviors by persuading ourselves that a dishonest act is in fact morally permissible. The results of the studies showed that 1) in permissive environments (where the potential to cheat is available, such as self-reporting performance) ordinary individuals will indeed be more likely to cheat or behave dishonestly when compared with situations where the experimenter or another person is responsible for assessing performance, 2) cheating led to significantly higher levels of moral disengagement, but also 3) when primed with moral saliency (for instance, reading an honor code before completing the experimental task) cheating was significantly lower. This highlighted not only when and why people may engage in dishonest behavior, but that there may be simple interventions to reduce such behaviors.