​Humans are moral beings. As we live in a society, we have several ethical principles which we are supposed to follow. However, many times those rules go against our narrow self interest. How do people behave in such situations?

In our lab, we study two moral principles- honesty and equity.

Cheating, alt​hough socially disapproved, is relatively common. People often 'bend the rules' in order to achieve some payoff for themselves or for the group. We study whether cheating is dine automatically and if honesty is an effortful behavior.

Another line of research in our lab is the idea that people dislike inequity. That is, they resist resource allocations where one gets more than his fair share. We study situations where this desired equity is in conflict with another allocation principle- resource maximization. We study the role of the personal responsibility the allocator have in the implementation of the inequity as the driving factor that may cause allocators to prefer less efficient allocations in order to maintain equity.

 

Related Publications

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1.     Shalvi, S., Eldar, O., & Bereby-Meyer, Y. (2012). Honesty Requires Time (and Lack of Justifications). Psychological science, 23(10), 1264-1270.‏

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2.     Bereby-Meyer, Y., & Shalvi, S. (2015). Deliberate honesty. Current Opinion in Psychology, 6, 195-198.

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3.     Amir, A., Kogut, T., & Bereby-Meyer, Y. (2016). Careful Cheating: People Cheat Groups Rather than Individuals. Frontiers in psychology, 7, 371-371.