Self-serving Altruism: Cheating Behavior Camouflaged as "Support" in Breaching the Social Norms

The influence of surrounding conditions can change a person’s behavior, both positive and negative behavior. The negative behavior in question is a behavior that violates applicable social norms. As with the presence of other people who will benefit from fraudulent behavior that occurs. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to identify patterns of fraudulent behavior that tend to escalate under the assumption that others will also benefit. This study used an experimental design with two groups that obtained differences in treatment (individual group vs. partner group). The number of participants was 122 people with a sampling technique, namely random sampling. The results of this study showed that the group that was informed that only participants themselves would receive benefits from each question that could be answered correctly showed lower average results (M = 6.88), when compared to the group that was informed that the benefits obtained would also be felt by partners from participants (M = 11.44). So it can be concluded that if there is profit sharing with others, it increases a person’s tendency to engage in unethical behavior. Keywords: self-serving altruism, experiment, unethical behavior