A partner in crime: Revisiting the dispositional basis of unethical loyalty

Unethical acts are often witnessed by bystanders who may lie to cover up for the transgressor, thereby helping them avoid sanctions. Here, we investigate the dispositional basis of such unethical loyalty, including the psychological processes involved. Interestingly, as unethical loyalty helps the transgressor, it sets prosociality against honesty—two behaviors that are usually unified within the same traits, most prominently HEXACO Honesty-Humility. Prior research suggests that individuals high in Honesty-Humility may solve this conflict in favor of honesty, but evidence is scarce and inconclusive. We aimed at extending previous findings in a pre-registered study ( N = 472) using a newly developed online version of an incentivized behavioral paradigm measuring unethical loyalty. As expected, Honesty-Humility showed a medium-sized negative relation with unethical loyalty, which was partly attributable to individual differences in perceiving unethical loyalty as (un)justifiable. Specifically, lower levels of Honesty-Humility were associated with perceiving unethical loyalty as justifiable particularly because it profits oneself, whereas considering unethical loyalty as profitable for the transgressor—and thus prosocial—was not significantly related to Honesty-Humility. This suggests that part of the predictive power of Honesty-Humility for unethical loyalty can be attributed to systematic differences in how individuals justify such unethical acts.