Recent studies lead to the paradoxical conclusion that the act of affirming one's egalitarian or pro-social values and virtues might subsequently facilitate prejudiced or self-serving behavior, an effect previously referred to as "moral credentialing." The present study extends this paradox to the domain of academic misconduct and investigates the hypothesis that such an effect might be limited by the extent to which misbehavior is rationalizable. Using a paradigm designed to investigate deliberative and rationalized forms of cheating (von Hippel, Lakin, & Shakarchi, 2005), we found that when participants had credentialed themselves (versus a non-close acquaintance) via a set of hypothetical moral dilemmas, they were more likely to cheat on a subsequent math task, but only if cheating was highly rationalizable. When cheating was difficult to rationalize, moral credentialing had almost no impact on cheating.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 55. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 06 February 2026.
All research outputs
#985,568
of 34,400,738 outputs
Outputs from Ethics & Behavior
#7
of 357 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#4,104
of 256,237 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Ethics & Behavior
#1
of 2 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,400,738 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 97th percentile: it's in the top 5% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 357 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a little more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 7.4. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 256,237 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 98% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 2 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has scored higher than all of them
