When Good People Do Wrong: Morality, Social Identity, and Ethical Behavior

The main theoretical advance in recent research has been in understanding how people act unethically despite being fully aware that they are being unethical. This contrasts with models rooted in the developmental literature that make the implicit assumption that people behave unethically only when they are unaware they are doing so. It is important to acknowledge that none of the scholars from this tradition made this claim explicitly. Nevertheless, models whose central tenet is that the sophistication of individuals’ moral reasoning predicts their moral behavior (cf. Kohlberg, 1984; Kohlberg & Kramer, 1969) do suggest that moral behavior results from people being made aware of moral dilemmas.