Dark versus light personality types and moral choice

In this preregistered study, participants were administered validated short-form instruments assessing dark and light personality traits, and they also completed simple building-block tasks relevant to business ethics (e.g., organizational citizenship and counterproductive workplace behaviors). Specifically, participants were administered consequential prosociality and dishonesty decision tasks, as well as the hypothetical moral (Trolley) dilemma task. Overall, the results support the hypotheses that dark, compared to light, personality traits are associated with lower levels of prosociality, higher likelihood of dishonesty, and an increased willingness to make immoral choices. Follow-up data suggest the likely mechanisms connecting personality to (un)ethical choices are at least two-fold: darker personality types are less sensitive to behavioral deviations from a common norm; darker types also have different perceptions of what is others’ ethical norm.