Deception is pervasive in negotiations, and proponents of bounded ethicality propose that the decision to use deception reflects the influence of (unconscious) implicit processes. In this article, we empirically explore the bounded ethicality perspective. In the first experiment, we found that an implicit association between business and morality interacted with the competitive and cooperative characteristics of a negotiation to influence both negotiators' attitudes toward deception and their intentions to use deception. But in a second and third experiment, we found that these did not interact to influence negotiators' actual deception decisions. The results of our studies provide important insights into the deception decision process and complicate our understanding of bounded ethicality.

Negotiations are breeding grounds for deception (Lewicki 1983; Tenbrunsel 1998; Schweitzer 2005). The use of deception is pervasive for two reasons: negotiators often have private and asymmetric information (Schweitzer and Croson 1999; Schweitzer 2001, 2005), and they often find it difficult to detect and respond to deception (Ekman and O'Sullivan 1991; Ekman, O'Sullivan, and Frank 1999; Bond and DePaulo 2006). Presented with the opportunity to deceive their counterparts, self‐interested negotiators commonly misrepresent information to increase their power and profits (O'Connor and Carnevale 1997; Bazerman et al. 2000).

Joseph Gaspar and Maurice Schweitzer (2013) have described deception as the intentional misrepresentation of information (see also Murnighan 1991; Boles, Croson, and Murnighan 2000), and prior research has conceptualized deception in negotiations as unethical. For instance, Ann Tenbrunsel (1998) described the misrepresentation of information to arbitrators as unethical, and Karl Aquino (1998) described the misrepresentation of salary information to a prospective hire as unethical. This description of deception as unethical reflects a consensus among lay negotiators that the misrepresentation of factual information is an unethical negotiation tactic (Lewicki and Stark 1996; Lewicki and Robinson 1998; Robinson, Lewicki, and Donahue 2000).

What influences negotiators’ decision to use deception and mislead their counterparts? Max Bazerman and his colleagues (Banaji, Bazerman, and Chugh 2003; Bazerman and Banaji 2004; Kern and Chugh 2009; Bazerman 2011; Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011) recently proposed that the limits of the conscious mind restrict and constrain negotiators’ morality. According to this perspective, negotiators are boundedly ethical, such that (unconscious) implicit processes influence the decision to use deception in negotiation and related interpersonal contexts.

Although theoretical research on bounded ethicality has considered the role of implicit processes in the decision to use deception, no prior empirical research has examined the prospective influence of these processes in negotiations. Does the moral unconscious—as proponents of the bounded ethicality perspective argue—influence the use of deception in negotiation? In a series of experimental studies, we focus on a particular unconscious implicit process: an implicit association between business (as a broad concept — not just a set of behaviors) and morality. In this article, we empirically explore the bounded ethicality perspective. In the first experiment, we found that an implicit association between business and morality interacted with the competitive and cooperative characteristics of a negotiation to influence both negotiators' attitudes toward deception and their intentions to use deception. But in a second and third experiment, we found that these did not interact to influence negotiators' actual deception decisions. In all, the results of our studies provide important insights into the deception decision process and complicate our understanding of bounded ethicality.

Early research on deception modeled the deception decision process through a rational choice framework of decision making. For instance, Roy Lewicki (1983) described negotiators’ deception decisions as the product of their perceptions of the costs and benefits of deception, and George Akerlof (1970) argued that sellers of used cars will always lie if it is in their interest to do so.

The rational choice framework discussed in research on deception in negotiation is consistent with that in research on unethical behavior. For instance, rational crime theory proposes that the decision to behave unethically reflects the influence of individuals’ perceptions of the likelihood that they will be detected, the expected punishment, and the perceived benefits of dishonesty (Becker 1968). In related research, James Rest (1986) and Tom Jones (1991) proposed that the decision to behave unethically reflects a cognitive, controlled, and reason‐based process (for a discussion, see Treviño, Weaver, and Reynolds 2006).

Although the rational choice framework has provided the foundation for much of the research on deception and unethical behavior, more recently scholars have argued that the deception decision process reflects the influence of (unconscious) implicit processes. In research on deception, Max Bazerman and his colleagues (Banaji et al. 2003; Bazerman and Banaji 2004; Kern and Chugh 2009; Bazerman 2011; Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011) proposed that the limits of the conscious mind restrict and constrain the morality of negotiators. Further, in research on ethical decision making, Scott Reynolds (2006) developed a neurocognitive model that describes the dominant role of the unconscious in the ethical decision‐making process (see also Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010). In this more recent research, negotiators are boundedly ethical.

According to theories of social cognition, implicit associations are “traces of past experience” stored in cognitive schemas (Greenwald and Banaji 1995) that are initiated without effort, control, awareness, or intention in response to relevant stimuli (Bargh 1989, 1994; Greenwald and Banaji 1995). In contrast to explicit associations, which researchers can capture using traditional self‐reporting measures, implicit associations are located in the unconscious and therefore introspectively inaccessible. For this reason, they must be captured through other mechanisms, such as the implicit association test (IAT) (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998; Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji 2003; Greenwald et al. 2009). These implicit associations are of special interest to researchers because they can unconsciously bias the behavior of even the most well‐intended of negotiators (Banaji et al. 2003; Bazerman and Banaji 2004; Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011).

In this article, we focus on a particularly important implicit association: that between business and morality. Following Scott Reynolds and his colleagues (2010), we describe this association as an implicit belief in the morality of business—a negotiator's belief that business is inherently moral or inherently immoral. Beliefs about business are important to the study of deception in negotiations because negotiation is pervasive in business, and deception is pervasive in negotiation.

In the United States, business (as a concept) is closely associated with the neoclassical economic paradigm that emphasizes competition and self‐interest (Ghoshal and Moran 1996; Pfeffer 1997; Morrison and Milliken 2000; Ferraro, Pfeffer, and Sutton 2005; Jones 2011; Jones and Felps 2013; Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010). The prominence of this neoclassical economic paradigm is reflected in research on negotiation and management. For instance, Chao Chen, Mike Peng, and Patrick Saparito (2002: 567–583) noted that “TCE [transaction cost economics] has become a major paradigm in social science research. … One of its key building blocks is the assumption of opportunism.” Further, agency theory assumes that agents will behave in their own narrow self‐interest (e.g., Eisenhardt 1989; Shapiro 2005), and rational deception frameworks predict that negotiators will use deception whenever the perceived benefits of deception (e.g., increase in payoffs) exceed the perceived costs of deception (e.g., likelihood and consequences of deception; for discussion, see Gaspar and Schweitzer 2013).

The relationship between implicit beliefs in the morality of business and the practice of deception in negotiation reflects the importance of legitimacy: because morality is an aspect of legitimacy (Suchman 1995; Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010), individuals who believe that business is inherently moral believe in the legitimacy of the neoclassical economic paradigm and of unbounded self‐interest and competition (Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010). In contrast, individuals who believe that business is an inherently immoral activity challenge the legitimacy of the neoclassical economic paradigm; they see unbounded self‐interest and competition as illegitimate and believe instead in the importance of joint interests and cooperation (Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010). Importantly, because implicit beliefs create overarching “shalts and shalt nots” (Ferraro et al. 2005: 10) and serve as the foundation for theories that “people frequently feel compelled to live out” (Leavitt, Zhu, and Aquino 2011: 7), we expect that implicit beliefs in the morality of business will influence the deception decision process in a manner consistent with these beliefs.

The deception decision process is interactive, however, and reflects the negotiator's personal characteristics — such as her or his implicit beliefs — and also the characteristics of the negotiation (Lewicki 1983; Gaspar and Schweitzer 2013). In this study, we considered a particularly important dimension of negotiations: whether the negotiator perceived the negotiation as competitive or cooperative.

Prior research has demonstrated that the characteristics of a negotiation that influence negotiators' perceptions of the competitiveness and cooperativeness of the negotiation influence the deception decision process. For instance, Wolfgang Steinel and Carsten K. W. De Dreu (2004) found that competitive contexts can induce negotiators to offer inaccurate information and conceal accurate information (see also Tenbrunsel and Messick 1999 and Schweitzer, DeChurch, and Gibson 2005).

We propose here that the competitive or cooperative characteristics of a negotiation will interact with negotiators’ implicit processes, such that those elements of the negotiation that emphasize competition and self‐interest will reinforce the effect of a negotiator's implicit belief that business is moral on his or her decision to use deception. More specifically, we predict that in a competitive as opposed to a cooperative negotiation context, negotiators with an unconscious implicit belief that business is moral will be more likely to describe deception as a reasonable negotiation tactic, to indicate a willingness to use deception in a negotiation, and to use deception when presented with the opportunity.

We conducted a series of studies to explore the possibility that negotiators’ unconscious implicit beliefs would interact with the negotiation context to influence deception in negotiations. In Experiment One, participants read a scenario and indicated their attitudes toward and intentions to use deception. In Experiment Two and Experiment Three, participants completed a negotiation task with real monetary stakes.

The negotiation task described in Experiment One and simulated in Experiment Two and Experiment Three was the ultimatum task with uncertain information. The uncertain information task has been used in prior research to study deception and unethical behavior in negotiation contexts (Croson, Boles, and Murnighan 2003; Moran and Schweitzer 2008; Koning et al. 2011; Shalvi, Handgraaf, and De Dreu 2011). The uncertain information ultimatum task is “free from the influence past relationships, qualifications, or future expectations might exert and designed to disentangle dynamics of the bargaining process” (Solnick and Schweitzer 1999: 2010).

In the typical ultimatum task, the Proposer receives a sum of money and must determine how much of this money to keep and how much of this money to offer to the Responder. If the Responder accepts the Proposer's division, the Proposer and Responder receive the money according to the proposed division. If the Responder declines the Proposer's division, however, neither the Proposer nor the Responder receives any money.

In the uncertain information ultimatum task, the Responder does not know how much money the Proposer has been given to divide; rather, the Responder knows only that the amount ranges from X to Y with any amount within that range equally likely. For this reason, in the uncertain information task, Proposers also make a claim about how much money they received to divide. This information uncertainty and asymmetry creates the opportunity for the Proposer to misrepresent information to the Responder.

Although the structural characteristics of the negotiation were the same for all participants, the description of the negotiation differed across conditions. In the competitive condition, the instructions described the negotiation in competitive terms, and in the cooperative condition, the instructions described the negotiation in cooperative terms (Larrick and Blount 1997; Burnham, McCabe, and Smith 2000; Liberman, Samuels, and Ross 2004). We randomly assigned participants to the competitive condition or cooperative condition in the studies.

In the competitive condition, the instructions for the task described it as the “Wall Street Task” and the Proposer and Responder as “Competitor One” and “Competitor Two.” The instructions also described the decision of the Responder as “reject” or “accept” and included a black‐and‐white illustration of the charging bull sculpture that stands near Wall Street.

In the cooperative condition, the instructions described the task as the “Community Task” and the Proposer and Responder as “Partner One” and “Partner Two.” The instructions also described the Responder's possible decisions as “claim” or “not claim” and included a black‐and‐white illustration of a pair of clasped hands.

We conducted a pilot study to confirm the effectiveness of the manipulation used in Experiments One, Two, and Three. For this study, we recruited forty‐three undergraduate students (40 percent male, mean age = 23.70, SD = 6.07) from courses offered in the business school of a large university in the northeastern United States. The participants received extra course credit for their participation and a ticket for a drawing to receive a monetary bonus ($10.00–$25.00).

We randomly assigned participants to the competitive or cooperative condition (see prior discussion for a full description of the manipulation), provided the instructions to the uncertain information task, and asked them to indicate their agreement with these four statements: “This negotiation is very competitive,” “This negotiation is very cooperative,” “This negotiation is more competitive than cooperative,” and “This negotiation is more cooperative than competitive” (Kay et al. 2004; Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010). We measured all responses on a Likert‐style scale, with 1 indicating “strongly disagree” and 7 indicating “strongly agree.”

The results confirmed the effectiveness of the manipulation. Participants in the competitive condition perceived the negotiation as more competitive than those in the cooperative condition,1 and participants in the cooperative condition perceived the negotiation as more cooperative than did those in the competitive condition.2 Further, participants in the competitive condition perceived the negotiation as more “competitive than cooperative” than did those in the cooperative condition,3 and participants in the cooperative condition perceived the negotiation as more “cooperative than competitive” than did those in the competitive condition.4

Participants

We recruited eighty‐two undergraduate business students (45 percent male, mean age = 23.80, standard deviation [SD] = 5.90) from courses offered in the business school of a large university in the northeastern United States to participate in an experimental study. The participants received extra course credit for their participation and a ticket for the chance to receive a monetary bonus ($10.00–$25.00) in a drawing.

Study Design

We informed participants that they would complete a series of unrelated tasks. First, participants completed an IAT that measured their unconscious implicit beliefs in the morality of business (Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010). Second, we randomly assigned participants to the competitive or cooperative condition, and participants responded to a scenario. Finally, participants completed a questionnaire that measured their explicit beliefs in the morality of business (Weaver, Treviño, and Cochran 1999) and provided demographic information.5

Negotiation Scenario and Manipulation

In Experiment One, we informed participants that a “prior participant” named Chris had participated in a previous study involving the uncertain information ultimatum task and had decided to misrepresent the amount of money that he/she received to mislead his/her counterpart.

The structural characteristics of the negotiation scenario were the same for all participants, but we described the negotiation differently across conditions (see above). In the competitive condition, the description used competitive terms, and in the cooperative condition, the description used cooperative terms. We randomly assigned participants to the competitive condition or cooperative condition.

Measures

Implicit Belief in the Morality of Business

We measured (unconscious) implicit beliefs in the morality of business with an IAT (Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010). The IAT is a computer‐based test that asks participants to categorize stimulus‐items into four categories. This test captures the tendency of people to respond faster to associations that are implicitly associated than to those that are not implicitly associated. In this particular IAT, the primary categories are “business” and “sports,” and the secondary categories are “ethical” and “unethical.” “Sports” is a control category that serves to control for participants’ tendencies to associate “a similarly familiar category with ethical versus unethical behavior” (Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010: 754).

The IAT consists of four experimental blocks. In the first experimental block, subjects sort words by pressing the “d” key when words associated with business appear (e.g., profit, CEO, boardroom) and the “k” key when items associated with sports appear (e.g., locker room, stadium, athlete). In the second experimental block, subjects similarly sort items by pressing “d” when terms referring to behaviors generally seen as ethical appear (e.g., being fair, helping, considering others) and “k” when terms referring to behaviors generally considered to be unethical appear (e.g., stealing, hurting others, cheating). In the third and fourth experimental blocks, subjects complete the two previous tasks using an alternative, shared response key. Specifically, in the third experimental block, subjects sort items by pressing “d” when business terms and ethical items appear, and “k” when sports terms and unethical terms appear; in the fourth experimental block, subjects sort the items by pressing “d” when business items or unethical items appear and “k” when sports items or ethical items appear.

The IAT produces a standardized score—the Greenberg D‐score—that reflects differences in response times between experimental blocks three and four. The score is assessed on a continuous scale such that negative scores indicate a stronger association between business and immorality and positive scores indicate a stronger association between business and morality.

Attitudes Toward Deception

We measured participants’ attitudes toward deception with the question, “How justifiable is it for Chris to understate and misrepresent the amount of money she/he received?” (1 = not at all justifiable, 7 = very justifiable).

Intentions to Use Deception

We measured participants’ intentions to use deception in negotiation with the question, “If you were in the same situation as Chris, how likely would you be to act in the same way as Chris?” (1 = not at all likely, 7 = very likely).

Explicit Belief in the Morality of Business

We measured explicit beliefs in the morality of business using a five‐item scale created by Gary Weaver and his colleagues (1999). Participants indicated the extent to which they believed each of five concepts (e.g., valuing integrity as much as profits) should be important to business on a 7‐point Likert‐style scale (1 = not at all important to 7= extremely important). The scale demonstrated high reliability (α = 0.93).

Demographics

We also asked participants to indicate their age, gender, years of work experience, and level in their organization.

Results

We predicted that participants’ unconscious implicit beliefs in the morality of business would interact with the competitive and cooperative characteristics of the negotiation to influence their attitudes toward deception and their intentions to use deception.

The results of a regression analysis indicated that participants’ implicit beliefs in the morality of business interacted with the competitive and cooperative characteristics of the negotiation scenario to influence participants’ attitudes toward deception.6 The interaction, depicted in Figure One, indicates that the negotiation context reinforced negotiators’ implicit beliefs and influenced negotiators’ attitudes toward deception as we predicted: participants in the competitive condition with an implicit belief that business is moral were most likely to describe deception as a permissible negotiation tactic.

Figure One

Interaction of Implicit Beliefs, Negotiation Characteristics, and Deception Attitudes

Note: The slopes are plotted at one standard deviation above and one standard deviation below the mean of implicit beliefs in the morality of business (Aiken and Stephen 1991). 1 = not at all justifiable, 7 = very justifiable.

Figure One

Interaction of Implicit Beliefs, Negotiation Characteristics, and Deception Attitudes

Note: The slopes are plotted at one standard deviation above and one standard deviation below the mean of implicit beliefs in the morality of business (Aiken and Stephen 1991). 1 = not at all justifiable, 7 = very justifiable.

Close modal

The results of a second regression analysis also indicated that participants’ implicit beliefs in the morality of business interacted with the competitive and cooperative contextual characteristics of the negotiation to affect participants’ intentions to use deception.7 The interaction, depicted in Figure Two, indicates that the negotiation context reinforced negotiators’ implicit beliefs and influenced their intentions to use deception as we predicted: participants in the competitive condition with an implicit belief that business is moral were most likely to indicate that they would use deception to mislead their counterpart.

Figure Two

Implicit Beliefs, Negotiation Characteristics, and Deception Intentions

Note: The slopes are plotted at one standard deviation above and one standard deviation below the mean of implicit beliefs in the morality of business (Aiken and Stephen 1991). 1 = not at all likely, 7 = very likely.

Figure Two

Implicit Beliefs, Negotiation Characteristics, and Deception Intentions

Note: The slopes are plotted at one standard deviation above and one standard deviation below the mean of implicit beliefs in the morality of business (Aiken and Stephen 1991). 1 = not at all likely, 7 = very likely.

Close modal

The purpose of Experiment Two was to explore our prediction in a parallel negotiation task with real monetary stakes. The task that participants completed was the task described to participants in Experiment One.

Participants

We recruited seventy‐three students from courses in the graduate program in business administration at the same university in the northeastern United States (59 percent male, mean age = 30.08, SD = 6.60) to participate in this study. They received extra course credit, a $2.00 participation gratuity, and the opportunity to receive an additional bonus payment. The bonus payment was determined by their decisions (e.g., how much to offer, how much to claim) in the negotiation task.

Study Design

We informed participants that they would complete a series of unrelated tasks. First, they completed the IAT (Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010). Second, we randomly assigned participants to the competitive or cooperative condition, and they participated in the uncertain information ultimatum task. Finally, participants answered questions about their explicit beliefs in the morality of business (Weaver, Treviño, and Cochna 1999) and provided demographic information.

Negotiation Task and Manipulation

We used the same uncertain information ultimatum task as in Experiment One. We informed participants that they would be randomly paired with each other and randomly assigned to negotiation roles. In reality, we paired each participant with a computer that was preprogrammed to respond to their decisions, and we assigned all participants to the role of Proposer.

In this uncertain information ultimatum task, participants each received $10.00. We told them that their counterpart did not know this amount and only knew that the total amount to divide ranged from $1.00 to $15.00 with any $0.50 increment within that range equally likely. We instructed participants to make an offer to the other negotiator ($0.00–$10.00) and to make a claim about the sum of money that they received to divide ($1.00–$15.00).

Although the structural characteristics of the negotiation scenario were the same for all participants, the description of the negotiation differed across conditions (see prior discussion for a full description of the manipulation). We randomly assigned participants to the competitive or cooperative condition.

Measures

Implicit Beliefs, Explicit Beliefs, and Controls

Participants took the IAT and completed the explicit belief (α = 0.89) and demographics measures described in Experiment One.

Deception

We measured deception behavior through participants’ decisions in the uncertain information negotiation task. The decisions had real monetary consequences such that the payments participants received were directly linked to their decisions. We measured deception behavior as the difference between the amount of money that participants received ($10.00) and the amount that participants told their negotiation counterpart they had actually received (see Croson et al. 2003; Moran and Schweitzer 2008). For instance, participants who claimed to receive $9.00 (deception = $10.00–$9.00 = $1.00) behaved less deceptively than those who claimed to receive $2.00 (deception = $10.00–$2.00 = $8.00).

Results

The results of the regression analysis did not support our prediction that implicit beliefs would interact with the contextual characteristics of the negotiation to influence actual deception behavior.8

We considered that the graduate business students who participated in Experiment Two might have had more strongly internalized norms, perhaps reflective of the ethical cultures of their organizations (Treviño, Weaver, and Reynolds 2006; Tenbrunsel and Smith‐Crowe 2008), which could have more strongly influenced their behavior in the experiment than did the experimental manipulation. Further, it is possible that the graduate students, many of whom were well‐compensated in their jobs, were not fully motivated by the economic incentives in the negotiation. Taken together, these factors could explain why the results in Experiment Two did not support the results in Experiment One. In Experiment Three, we tested our hypotheses on a different sample: undergraduate business students that had fewer years of work experience.9

Participants

We recruited ninety‐one undergraduate students (53 percent male, mean age = 24.38, SD = 7.22) from courses offered in the business school of the same university in the United States. The participants received extra course credit, a $2.00 participation gratuity, and the opportunity to receive an additional bonus payment. As in Experiment Two, we determined the bonus payment based on their decisions in the negotiation task.

Design, Procedure, and Measures

The design, procedure, and measures were the same as those in Experiment Two. The explicit belief (α = 0.94) measure demonstrated high reliability.

Results

The results of the regression analysis again failed to support our hypothesis that implicit beliefs would interact with contextual characteristics of the negotiation to influence deception behavior.10 These results again failed to support the premise that was supported in Experiment One, in which we found strong support for the predicted interaction effect for both attitudes toward deception and intentions to use deception. However, the results of this study were consistent with the results of Experiment Two.11

Bazerman and his colleagues (Banaji et al. 2003; Bazerman and Banaji 2004; Kern and Chugh 2009; Bazerman 2011; Bazerman and Tenbrunsel 2011) have argued that the limits of the conscious mind restrict and constrain the morality of negotiators. In this perspective, negotiators are boundedly ethical, such that (unconscious) implicit processes pervade the deception decision process in negotiation and related interpersonal contexts. This perspective challenges many of the more traditional decision‐making models that describe the decision to use deception as conscious, rational, and reason‐based. Although theoretical research has examined the role of implicit processes on the decision to deceive, prior empirical research has not examined the role of implicit processes in the decision to use deception in negotiations.

In a series of experimental studies, we focused on a particular implicit process: an implicit association between business and morality. In our first experiment, we found that implicit processes and negotiation characteristics interact to influence attitudes toward deception and intentions to use deception, such that negotiators who held an implicit belief that business is moral in a competitive negotiation were most likely to describe deception as a reasonable negotiation tactic and most likely to intend to use deception in a negotiation. In our two follow‐up experiments, however, we found that implicit processes and negotiation characteristics did not interact to influence the decision to engage in actual deception behavior in negotiations in which real money was at stake.

The results of our studies complicate our understanding of bounded ethicality. The results also prompt reexamination of prior studies, particularly those that reported that implicit beliefs influence unethical behavior, but included only measures of attitudes and intentions (see Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010).

Some scholars have proposed that moral judgment precedes moral intent (Rest 1986), and that moral intent precedes moral behavior (Jones 1991; for a review, see Treviño, Weaver, and Reynolds 2006). Researchers have used this model to study deception and other forms of unethical behavior using scenario studies and then measuring attitudes about behavior and intentions to engage in behaviors. Our results suggest that the deception decision process is more complex than that described in these models. Specifically, our results suggest that the processes that influence how we feel about deception and whether we anticipate that we would use deception in certain circumstances may differ from those that influence the decisions to actually use deception. Although this is an important finding, extant theory and research results cannot fully explain it. Our results indicate the need for more refinement of the models that predict the relationship between implicit processes, negotiation characteristics, and deception decisions.

The studies we reported in this article suffer from some limitations. First, they focus on only one implicit belief: an implicit belief in the inherent morality of business. Individuals may hold many implicit beliefs (Reynolds 2006). These include beliefs about the morality of negotiation or the morality of one's negotiation counterpart. Indeed, negotiation is inherently interpersonal, and implicit beliefs about the morality of others may influence negotiation decisions.

The lack of results in Experiments Two and Three could also reflect the influence of a more salient, unconscious implicit process. Indeed, neurocognitive research suggests that different implicit beliefs reflect distinct moral prototypes and that the moral prototype that is most salient most strongly influences ethical decisions (Reynolds 2006). In negotiation contexts, more specific beliefs about negotiation and negotiation behavior may be more salient and therefore more influential than broader beliefs in the morality of business.

Another possible limitation is the way we measured implicit beliefs: with an association‐based measure. We selected an IAT because it is the most common measure of implicit beliefs in psychology and social psychology (Greenwald et al. 2009), and research has shown this particular IAT to provide a valid and reliable measurement of implicit beliefs in the morality of business (Reynolds, Leavitt, and DeCelles 2010). The IAT, however, is only one method of measuring implicit associations. Other accessibility‐based or interpretation‐based measures of implicit beliefs may, independently or interactively with the IAT measure, further increase the explanatory and predictive power of our theoretical model (Uhlmann et al. 2012).

In this article, we empirically explored the bounded ethicality perspective. In the first experiment, we found that an implicit association between business and morality interacted with the competitive and cooperative characteristics of a negotiation to influence both negotiators' attitudes toward deception and their intentions to use deception. But in a second and third experiment, we found that these did not interact to influence negotiators' actual decisions to use deception. In all, our results complicate our understanding of bounded ethicality and indicate the need for more research on the relationships among implicit processes, negotiation characteristics, and deception decisions.

We thank Keith Leavitt for all of his assistance in conducting the studies, and Danielle E. Warren, Linda K. Treviño, and Oliver J. Sheldon for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

1.

Competitive condition mean score of 3.98 (standard error [SE]) = 0.39) versus cooperative condition mean score of 2.78 (SE = 0.39); F [1, 38] = 4.34, p < 0.05.

2.

Cooperative condition mean score of 5.26 (SE = 0.37) versus competitive condition mean score of 4.21 (SE = 0.36); F [1, 38] = 4.11, p = 0.05.

3.

Competitive condition mean score of 4.08 (SE = 0.48) versus cooperative condition mean score of 2.25 (SE = 0.49); F [1, 38] = 6.98, p < 0.05.

4.

Cooperative condition mean score of 4.87 (SE = 0.47) versus competitive condition mean score of 3.58 (SE. = 0.46); F [1, 38] = 3.85, p = 0.05.

5.

The explicit belief measure is a control. This order, test implicit process first, then explicit, is typical in this research.

6.

beta = 2.27, SE = 1.07, t = 2.13, p < 0.05.

7.

beta = 1.81, SE = 0.92, t = 1.98, p = 0.05.

8.

beta = −1.07, SE = 1.75, t = −0.61, p = n.s.

9.

p < 0.001.

10.

beta = −0.80, SE = 1.32, t = −0.61, p = n.s.

11.

We also conducted a regression analysis on the full sample of participations in Experiment Two and Experiment Three. The results of this analysis failed to support our prediction (beta = −0.89, SE = 1.04, t = −0.85, p = n.s.) and were consistent with the separate results of Experiment Two and Experiment Three. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this recommendation.

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