Sweet Teenagers and Shameless Boomers? “Shady” Personality Characteristics across the Lifespan

Youth have been portrayed as reckless and ruthless for centuries, and older adults aren’t necessarily thought of as nice and considerate either (okay, boomer!). Other stereotypes suggest that, on average, men are less caring but also less manipulative compared to women. But what’s the truth about how antisocial, “shady” characteristics differ across age and gender? To find out, we studied the shady personality characteristics of egocentricity, manipulation, and callous affect in over 4,000 Dutch people who ranged in age from 11 to 77.   

Age differences in shady personality characteristics may exist because some of the challenges people face in life are age-related. For example, people in their 20s often compete with others in establishing a career and finding a romantic partner, and competition may lead people to be more underhanded. But, older adults might be more likely to experience other major life changes—for example, related to their own health or the health of their spouse or friends—that increase their stress and make them less nice and considerate. Age itself, though, is just one factor; the historical context matters, too. Although every generation faces its challenges, being an adolescent during the COVID-19 crisis instead of floating through adolescence on a cloud of 1970’s flower power may also affect what you’ll be like by age 50.

Similarly, men and women may differ in shady personality dimensions because of biological, socialization, and historical factors that affect men and women differently. For example, parents often treat children differently depending on their gender as when they allow boys to behave more aggressively than girls. Although gender differences in parenting may be smaller than they were a couple of decades ago, they might still cause men to be more shady than women later on in life. Similarly, society may encourage interests related to aggressive and therefore shady tendencies more in boys than in girls, which may further intensify gender differences in these tendencies. For example, my male colleagues seem to be more excited about 1980s Hulkamania than my female colleagues. If such factors are less strong today than they used to be, gender differences may also be smaller in younger age groups.

We already knew something about age and gender differences in shady characteristics from research on differences in the degree to which men and women are warm, supportive, and agreeable. And, a good deal of research has been conducted on narcissism, which is certainly associated with shady behavior. The shady characteristics we studied went beyond being disagreeable and narcissistic. The first one, known as “callous affect,” involves being insensitive to other people and having little remorse when you do something bad. The other two characteristics were “manipulation”—frequently lying and using other strategies such as giving insincere compliments—and “egocentricity”—seeking special treatment and admiration from other people.

Overall, people in their 20s scored higher, on average, on the shady characteristics than baby boomers. However, keep in mind that we compared average scores between age groups. Although the group in their 20s was more shady on average than the baby boomers, within each group, we found a great deal of variability in shadiness.  (You might remember that some of your high school classmates were quite shady, whereas others weren’t.)  In fact, the shadiest boomer was still about as shady as the shadiest 25-year old.

On average, the youngest group of participants (11-13 year-olds) was the least shady. So, average levels for shady tendencies rose from the preteens through adolescence and appeared to peak among people who were in their twenties. Then, they declined through adulthood.

This pattern is interesting because previous research, including our own, had suggested that adolescents might become less shady as they get older because they become increasingly conscientious and “mature.” However, these new results suggest a more complex picture in that shadiness seems to increase in adolescents alongside increasing “maturity.” Perhaps competition for romantic partners and jobs promotes a mix of desirable, “mature” characteristics such as conscientiousness along with a bit of shadiness, but we don’t know yet whether that’s the reason for these age trends.   

Our results for differences in shadiness between male and female participants were a bit surprising, as they were much smaller than you might have expected! Yes, the average man was perhaps a bit shadier than the average woman, but only by a small amount. And, the shadiest women were about as shady as the shadiest men!

Our findings provide some important nuances to common beliefs about age and gender. However, in absolute terms, the scores on our measures show that people were more likely to disagree than agree that they had shady characteristics. This suggests that, on average, people aren’t as bad as they are sometimes believed to be. They may just be less angelic at some points in their lives than at others.


For Further Reading

Klimstra, T. A., Jeronimus, B. F., Sijtsema, J. J., & Denissen, J. J. A. (2020). The unfolding dark side: Age trends in dark personality features. Journal of Research in Personality, 85, 103915.

 

Theo Klimstra currently is an associate professor in the Department of Developmental Psychology at Tilburg University, The Netherlands.

 

Why Are Some Powerful People Unethical?

Whether in the public arena or in informal contexts, people with power often engage in unethical behaviors. Endless news stories cover the latest political or business scandals that involve dishonesty and moral transgressions. Most of us can share personal accounts, such as working for a particularly mean boss, who does not seem to care much for rules or fear repercussions. A case in point is the widespread breaking of COVID-19 containment rules in 2020 by top British politicians including the then-prime minister, Boris Johnson.

Although it is a common belief that power corrupts, where opinions diverge is whether the experience of power over others makes normal people dishonest, or whether bad people become powerful in competitive societies. Disentangling these questions was our goal.

To do this, we examined the role of a dominant personality. Our definition of dominance was the habitual display of assertive and forceful behavior. Through such behavior, people with dominant personalities incite fear in others and attain status or power. Powerful people frequently appear dominant (think Donald Trump and Elon Musk). The observation that socially powerful positions are over-populated by dominant people is backed up by research. Dominant people gain influence because they behave in ways that signal competence, regardless of actual ability. They are efficient in learning how to attain self-advantages, and force others to comply. Dominance is also associated with various anti-social inclinations, such as hubris and narcissism. Dominant people are often entitled and believe themselves to be invincible.

But are dominant people more likely to be dishonest? Existing research on this question is less clear.

By combining these insights, we investigated whether powerful people behaving badly could be explained by high positions of society being crowded with dominant people, rather than caused by power itself. By establishing whether dominant people are more unethical compared to less dominant people, we were able to separate the effects of personality and power positions on unethical behavior.

We focused on the summer of 2020 when the British Government enforced strict COVID-19 containment rules across the country. On the surface, consistent with the stereotype that power corrupts, London residents in higher professional positions were more likely to break COVID rules, compared to those in lower professional positions. However, we found that this was due to the high concentration of dominant people taking up the higher positions. That is, dominant people were more likely to break COVID rules, and this tendency combined with the overlap between dominant people and high-powered people was the real reason that the breaking of COVID containment rules was pronounced among higher professional positions. Dominant Londoners felt entitled, and believed they were unlikely to suffer badly from getting COVID, which explained why they broke the rules.

The findings from this study were corroborated in an experiment. We recruited employed adults across the United Kingdom and found that managers lied more than subordinates to receive money. However, this was again explained by these managers already having dominant personalities. In other experiments, dominant people believed powerful roles suited them well, and wanted to have social power when given a choice, to a higher degree than their peers who were not as dominant. Such preference for powerful positions was evident even when they had no prior experience or expertise in the subject matter. This shows that dominant people are likely to put themselves forward when opportunities for power and career advancement become available.

Our research points to the possibility that the real reason the powerful misbehave is because individuals with dominant personalities rise to higher positions in the competitive societies we examined. Because dominant people also happen to be likely cheaters, instances of the powerful behaving unethically would increase.

Not all competitive hierarchies are favorable to the dominant, however, which provides food for thought. In academia, a specialist field where expert knowledge in subject matter is a pre-requisite for career advancement (more so than in… let's say politics), dominance did not coincide with higher positions. On the other hand, prestige, which is the garnering of respect based on reputation and experience, was closely tied to power and influence. Across multiple contexts, having prestige was not related to unethical behavior.

Advice for Organizations

What this means for organizations is this: When they look to promote individuals, they should actively look beyond the loud and pushy people who raise their hands, to those who may have expertise and experience, but are less inclined to put themselves in the limelight. Employers should carefully set apart indicators of competence from the confidence that dominant people display. This difficult but crucial separation could save organizations from the pitfalls of unethical leadership. Going further, it raises the possibility that at a societal level, the kind of people we like and choose as our leaders may be the hidden reason behind their frequent unethical behaviors.


For Further Reading

Kim, K., & Guinote, A. (2022). Cheating at the top: Trait dominance explains dishonesty more consistently than social power. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(12). https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672211051481


Kyoo Hwa Kim holds a PhD from University College London in Experimental Psychology and her research investigates unethical behaviors individuals make under competition or organizational pressures.

Ana Guinote is Professor of Social Cognition at University College London. Her research examines the various ways in which social power influences social cognition and behavior. 

Top Character & Context Posts in 2018

Here's a recap of our most visited blog posts in 2018. If there's one thing to learn from this list, it's that they are all worth a read.

12. Hidden Advantages and Disadvantages of Social Class, by Sébastien Goudeau, 2017

11. The Psychology of Social Class by Tony Manstead , 2018

10. How Do We Make Moral Judgements? by Joseph Tennant, 2015

9. The Relationship Implications of Rejecting a Partner for Sex Kindly vs Having Sex Reluctently by James Kim, 2018

8. When Political Ideology Undermines Logical Reasoning by Anup Gampa, 2016

7. Are Stereotypes Accurate? A Viewpoint from the Cognitive Science of Concepts by Lin Bian and Andrei Cimpian, 2016

6. The Effect of Money on Your Emotions, 2015

5. Prediction in Psychology by Alex Danvers, 2016

4. Knowing Who You Are Matters in Relationships by Lydia Emery, 2018

3. Stereotype Accuracy is One of the Largest and Most Replicable Effects in All of Social Psychology  by Lee Jusim, 2016

2. Anxious-Avoidant Duos: Walking on Thin Ice in Relationships and Physical Health by Jana Lembke, Fiona Ge, Paula Pietromonaco, and Sally Powers, 2015

1. The Consequences of Dishonesty by Scott Wiltermuth, David Newman, and Medha Raj, 2015

Are Liars Ethical?

We tend to think of lying as a vice and honesty as a virtue. For hundreds of years, theologians and philosophers have suggested that lying is wrong. For example, almost six hundred years ago, St. Augustine stated, “To me…it seems certain that every lie is a sin.” The prohibition of lying is deeply ingrained in most major religions and the presumption that lying is wrong leads scholars, parents, and leaders to broadly condemn lying.

Despite the characterization of lying as unethical, most people don’t completely avoid lying. Sometimes we lie for selfish reasons, but quite often, we lie to help and protect others. We tell prosocial liesWe may tell a prosocial lie when we tell a colleague that she delivered an excellent presentation (when in fact it lacked clarity), or when we tell a friend that we love her new haircut (when in fact it is unattractive). Prosocial lying can have large stakes; a doctor may tell a prosocial lie to a patient about her prognosis, with the hope of making her happy in her final weeks.

When people proclaim that lying is unethical, they aren’t usually thinking about prosocial lies. Existing research on the psychology of deception, for example, has largely ignored the benevolent intentions that often accompany dishonest behavior. Instead, most studies of deception have focused on lies that are told to benefit the self and exploit others. It is easy to understand why these lies are judged to be unethical. Selfish lies violate the moral principle of honesty and cause harm to others.

Prosocial lies, alternatively, represent conflicting social and ethical motivations. Prosocial lies violate the principle of honesty, but they also signal that an individual cares about others. Are prosocial lies judged to be ethical? My co-author, Maurice Schweitzer, and I sought to answer this question. In a recent article published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (Note: the article is behind a paywall, but you can email Emma at the address provided below to request a copy), we disentangle the competing signals of honesty and benevolence and we examine how prosocial lying affects judgments of moral character.

Across three experiments, we found that prosocial lies were judged to be more ethical than honest statements. Participants in our studies judged individuals who had lied or told the truth to a counterpart in a previous interaction. We used an economic game to operationalize deception and varied the incentives associated with lying and truth-telling throughout our experiments. For example, in our first study, individuals had the opportunity to lie about the outcome of a coin flip. If an individual lied to his counterpart (e.g., said the coin landed on heads, when it really landed on tails), the counterpart would earn a dollar; if an individual told the truth to his counterpart (e.g., said the coin landed on tails, when it landed on tails), the counterpart would earn nothing. That is, the individual could help his counterpart by lying to him. This approach allowed us to unambiguously manipulate the motives and outcomes associated with deception.

In every study, individuals who told lies that helped others were perceived to be more moral than individuals who told the truth, but harmed others. Importantly, we found that prosocial liars were perceived as deceptive; lies that help others are still considered lies. However, prosocial liars were also perceived to be benevolent, which drove perceptions of moral character. In our studies, demonstrating benevolence, or concern for others, was more closely related to judgments of moral character than upholding the principle of honesty. Lies that did not help others were judged to be unethical, but lies that helped others were judged to be ethical.

In our research, we also explored perceptions of lies that were told with good intentions, but led to bad outcomes. In the real world, we can rarely be certain of the consequences of our lies. Consider a husband who tells his wife that she looks great in a dress, with the intention of boosting her confidence. This lie, however, causes the wife to wear the dress to an important event and face public ridicule. In this case, the husband lied to help his wife, but actually caused her harm. Interestingly, in our research, we found that intentions mattered immensely in judging the ethicality of a lie, but outcomes did not matter at all. Individuals who told lies with the intention of helping their counterparts were judged as moral, even if they caused unforeseen harm to their counterparts.

So, should we all be telling more lies? Well, not necessarily, but at the very least, we should carefully consider when and why it might be right to lie, rather than broadly characterizing all deception as wrong. Most importantly, we should consider whether or not the intention of our deception is truly to help others. Honesty is a virtue, but it often conflicts with other equally important moral values, such as benevolence, loyalty, and mercy. Our research suggests that when benevolence and honesty conflict, benevolence may be more important than honesty.


Emma Levine is a 3rd-year PhD student at the Wharton School. Her research explores how people make inferences about others’ motives and how this influences moral judgment and trust. You can reach her at [email protected]

The Consequences of Dishonesty

Lying has its benefits. It allows people to feel better about themselves, to make themselves look better in others’ eyes, and to maintain good relationships. At the same time, lying can also create problems. Lying can be cognitively depleting, it can increase the risk that people will be punished, it can threaten people’s self-worth by preventing them from seeing themselves as “good” people, and it can generally erode trust in society.

How do we know whether lying will generate positive consequences, negative consequences, or a mix of both? In our recent review article, we suggested that paying attention to why people tell lies can allow people to forecast the consequences of those lies. We examined specifically how lying out of concern for others, out of the desire for material gain, and out of the desire to maintain a positive self-concept can yield sometimes surprising positive and negative consequences that relate directly to the desires motivating the lies.

Lies Motivated by Compassion

Because lying can create problems for the liar and being honest allows people to feel good about themselves, most of us tell the truth in most of our interactions. When we decide to lie, we privilege some other value over honesty. The value is often compassion, as people lie more about their feelings than about anything else. When people misrepresent how positively they feel about another person or something dear to another person, they build a connection with that person and avoid hurting that person’s feelings. As Levine and Schweitzer (2013, 2015) have found, those who tell prosocial lies are often viewed as more trustworthy and more moral than people who tell harsh truths. Moreover, these prosocial lies let us form larger social networks than we could otherwise maintain. In contrast, lies not motivated by compassion constrain the size of social networks.

However, not all prosocial lying driven by compassion yields benefits. People who receive overly positive feedback about their abilities are susceptible to thinking they will succeed in enterprises with very low chances of success and may therefore launch ill-advised ventures.

Lies Motivated By Desire for Material Gain

Desire for material gain also motivates people to lie. When this desire motivates lying, the consequences are likely to be negative – not only for the person caught trying to deceive others but for other people. When people lie out of self-interest, their deceptive behavior becomes a social norm. Lying is socially contagious in that when people see the precedent that dishonesty is appropriate, they are more likely to lie themselves. However, not all lying is contagious. Although people emulate the dishonesty of those whom they consider to be in their “in-group,” they become less likely to lie when they observe out-group members being dishonest (Gino, Ayal, & Ariely, 2009).

Not everyone will judge harshly people who lie out of desire for material gain. In some organizations, people will reward such deception because it can benefit colleagues and clients. As Pierce and Snyder (in press) demonstrated, employees who lie on behalf of customers are rewarded with greater financial gain and lower risk of termination. Their willingness to lie becomes social currency coveted by those who stand to benefit from their dishonesty.

One factor that prevents people from lying for personal gain is the need/desire to see oneself as a moral person. Lying motivates people to rationalize and justify their lies to themselves, so that they may continue to see themselves as good. When people morally disengage from the situation by rationalizing their behavior, they set themselves up to lie more in the future because they have already found a way to justify dishonesty. Resultantly deception of one type can lead to other forms of deception. For example, people who were asked to wear counterfeit sunglasses came to feel as though they were inauthentic. Consequently, these people became more likely than those in a control condition to over-report their performances on subsequent tasks to earn money. Small initial lies may therefore yield escalating forms of dishonesty, which is concerning because monitors have more difficulty noticing and policing a slow erosion of ethics compared to abrupt moral degradation.

Dishonesty motivated by desire for personal gain can also lead people to forget the rules that are intended to govern their behavior. As Shu and Gino (2012) have shown, people who lie will sometimes forget rules about lying while remembering other sorts of details. Additionally, liars may present themselves as virtuous by condemning others for the same types of deception that they themselves perpetrated.

Fortunately, self-interested deception does not always result in further deception. People will sometimes morally compensate for past dishonesty through prosocial actions or justifications for their behavior (e.g. Jordan, Mullen, Murnighan, 2011). 

Desire to Maintain Positive Self-Concept

People sometimes lie to themselves or others out of a need to see themselves positively. These efforts are sometimes successful, as people often experience greater positive emotions when exaggerating their intelligence or skill to themselves or others. As Ruedy, Moore, Gino, and Schweitzer (2013) have shown, people may also experience a duper’s delight or cheater’s high when they feel they have gotten away with deception. Furthermore, because cheating takes people out of a rule-following mindset, it can stimulate creativity by allowing them to combine previously unconnected ideas (Gino & Wiltermuth, 2014).

Deception intended to bolster the ego is not costless. Liars driven by the desire to see themselves positively can forget that their dishonesty contributed to their success. Consequently, they may make misguided bets about their future performance (Chance, Norton, Gino, & Ariely, 2011).

The consequences of lying are not as simple as they might seem. People often think that lies breed contempt and guilt, but they do much more. They foster relationships, build trust, destroy social networks, create social networks, make people more creative, and influence how often other people lie. We have argued in our review article that understanding why people lie goes a long way in predicting which of these consequences result from dishonesty.


References

Levine EE, Schweitzer ME: Are liars ethical? On the tension between benevolence and honesty. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 2014, 53:107-117.

Levine EE, Schweitzer ME: Prosocial lies: When deception breeds trust. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 2015, 126:88-106

Pierce L, Snyder JA: Unethical demand and employee turnover. Journal of Business Ethics, forthcoming.

Shu L, Gino F: Sweeping dishonesty under the rug: How unethical actions lead to forgetting of moral rules. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2012, 102:1164-1177.

Jordan J, Mullen E, Murnighan JK: Striving for the moral self: The effects of recalling past moral actions on future moral behavior. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2011, 37:701-713.

Ruedy NE, Moore C, Gino F, Schweitzer ME: The cheater’s high: The unexpected affective benefits of unethical behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2013, 105:531-548.

Chance Z, Norton M, Gino F, Ariely D: Temporal view of the costs and benefits of self-deception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 2011, 108:15655-15659.

Gino F, Wiltermuth SS: Evil genius? How dishonesty can lead to greater creativity. Psychological Science 2014, 25:973-981


Scott S. Wiltermuth ([email protected]) is an associate professor of management and organizations at the University of Southern California. He received his doctorate from Stanford University. He studies ethics and morality. His research also investigates how interpersonal dynamics, such as dominance and submissiveness, influence cooperation and coordination.

David T. Newman ([email protected]) is a doctoral student in management and organization at the University of Southern California. He earned his B.A. in psychology from Yale University and his J.D. from Harvard Law School. His research interests include business ethics, the morality of technology, the pursuit of meaning, and the psychology of property and ownership. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program, David worked for EthicalSystems.org, a non-profit collaboration of researchers dedicated to the advancement of a systems approach to better business practices.

Medha Raj ([email protected]) is a doctoral student in Management and Organizations at the University of Southern California. She earned her A.B. from Dartmouth College, where she majored in Economics and minored in psychology. She studies interpersonal interaction with a focus on prosocial tendencies and behaviors. In some of her research, she studies the role of guilt-proneness, forgiveness, and prosocial lying in both interpersonal and organizational contexts.