Taya R. Cohen

Antisemitism, characterized by prejudice, discrimination, and hostility toward Jews, is marked by two enduring paradoxes. First, although people typically defer to powerholders, perceptions of Jews as powerful are associated with disdain rather than deference among antisemites. Second, antisemitism emerges among individuals with opposing ideological worldviews, those who strongly support societal hierarchies and those who vehemently oppose them. To explain these paradoxes, we introduce the Dual Threat Model of Antisemitism, which highlights the central role of perceived Jewish power in fueling antisemitism. The model posits that perceived Jewish power—defined as perceived control over valuable resources—elicits two distinct types of threat. For proponents of hierarchy, perceived Jewish power threatens in-group dominance, challenging their desire to maintain group superiority. For opponents of hierarchy, perceived Jewish power threatens egalitarian ideals, undermining their vision of a fair and equal society. Evidence from the US, Mexico, Australia, UK, Germany, and Poland lends cross-cultural support to the model. We discuss the implications of the model and the empirical evidence for designing interventions aimed at curbing antisemitism.

Honesty, defined as freedom from fraud or deception, is widely valued in many aspects of life, from personal relationships to professional settings. Yet acts of dishonesty remain widespread, including political and corporate scandals, misinformation, personal betrayal, and so on. Understanding honesty and the factors that influence it provides insights that are essential for fostering trust and combating corruption. In this review, we synthesize key findings from research on honesty, focusing on when people choose to be truthful or deceptive. We argue that although much is known about honesty in isolated, low-risk contexts, an urgent need exists to study honesty in more complex, realistic settings, such as those involving interpersonal relationships, potential sanctions, or group influences. Our proposed framework highlights understudied contexts and encourages future studies to explore settings where enforcement and social dynamics play a significant role in decision-making. To do so, we point out 66 open research questions that we find most promising to explore. By integrating insights from multiple disciplines, we aim to advance the understanding of honesty and provide a roadmap for research that can inform policies and interventions to promote integrity in society.

Objective: We introduce the concept of moral beacons—individuals who are higher in moral character than their peers and prominent within their social environment—and examine the degree to which moral beacons increase the moral awareness of their peers.Background: Using data from cohorts of students in graduate business education across two universities, we applied theory and methods from organizational behavior, personality psychology, and social networks analysis to test two research questions about moral beacons.Method: We used latent profile analysis of data from personality questionnaires and social network surveys completed by graduate business students at two universities (N = 502) to identify individuals classified as moral beacons. We used peer nominations and an in‐class business case discussion exercise to assess moral influence.Results: Latent profile analysis identified a latent class of moral beacons in our sample. These individuals received more nominations from their peers in end‐of‐class surveys as guides for moral thought and action and positively impacted the moral awareness of their peers in a discussion of a difficult business case about possible lead poisoning of employees, but did not significantly change their counterparts' moral awareness in a different case.Conclusions: These results provide promising initial evidence that moral beacons can be distinguished from their peers by both moral character and social prominence and can act as guides for others, at times encouraging greater consideration of the moral aspects of situations and decisions. As these results are the first of their kind, we encourage further replication and investigations of moral beacons and moral influence in other settings.

While people across the world value honesty, it is undeniable that it can sometimes pay to be dishonest. This tension leads people to engage in complex behaviors that stretch the boundaries of honesty. Such behaviors include strategically avoiding information, dodging questions, omitting information, and making true but misleading statements. Though not lies per se, these are nonetheless deviations from honesty that have serious interpersonal, organizational, and societal costs. Based on a systematic review of 169 empirical research articles in the fields of management, organizational behavior, applied psychology, and business ethics, we develop a new multidimensional framework of honesty that highlights how honesty encompasses more than the absence of lies—it has relational elements (e.g., fostering an accurate understanding in others through what we disclose and how we communicate) and intellectual elements (e.g., evaluating information for accuracy, searching for accurate information, and updating our beliefs accordingly). By acknowledging that honesty is not limited to the moment when a person utters a clear lie or a full truth, and that there are multiple stages to enacting honesty, we emphasize the shared responsibility that all parties involved in communication have for seeking out and communicating truthful information.

This study examined responses from more than one thousand employed adults across the United States to shed light on the causal directions and temporal dynamics between, on the one hand, the hostile social situations employees face at work (i.e., workplace mistreatment) and, on the other hand, the harmful behaviors that employees enact at work. Using autoregressive cross-lagged panel analyses on a 12-wave longitudinal dataset, we show that employees’ bad behaviors at work (e.g., sabotage, theft, abuse of coworkers) are both a cause and a consequence of experiencing mistreatment from colleagues and supervisors (e.g., ostracism, everyday discrimination, abusive supervision). We investigate the temporal aspects of this reciprocal relationship and find that deviance-to-mistreatment and mistreatment-to-deviance effects both occur over a 1-week time horizon. Moreover, this reciprocal relationship continued across the 12 weeks of the study, and its magnitude neither intensified nor diminished over this time period. Finally, we investigated the role of moral character evaluations in the reciprocal mistreatment-deviance relationship. Our results revealed that individuals whose moral character is more positively regarded by coworkers (i.e., those evaluated as higher in honesty-humility) are less penalized by others in response to their deviance. We discuss theoretical and managerial implications of these results for mitigating deviance and mistreatment in organizations.

Overlooked in previous models of personality, guilt proneness is an important moral character trait that predicts job performance and leadership potential. We all make mistakes or fail to live up to our own or other people’s standards on occasion. People who are low in guilt proneness are not particularly bothered by mistakes or transgressions, and as such fail to take corrective action to fix them or avoid such behavior in the first place. The highly guilt prone, on the other hand, feel bad about mistakes and transgressions, especially when their actions negatively impact others. Moreover, they can anticipate such feelings before they occur and as a result behave more responsibly and ethically. In this chapter, I describe what guilt proneness is, how it can be measured, and provide evidence suggesting that individuals with higher versus lower levels of guilt proneness have better job performance and are better leaders, owing to their heightened sense of interpersonal responsibility. Individuals with higher levels of guilt proneness work harder at their jobs, commit less workplace deviance, do more organizational citizenship, and make more favorable impressions on negotiation counterparts, as compared to individuals with lower levels of guilt proneness.

Lawyers have broad discretion in deciding how honestly to behave when negotiating. We propose that lawyers’ choices about whether to disclose information to correct misimpressions by opposing counsel are guided by their moral character and their cognitive framing of negotiation. To investigate this possibility, we surveyed 215 lawyers from across the United States, examining the degree to which honest disclosure is associated with lawyers’ moral character and their tendency to frame negotiation in game‐like terms—a construal of negotiation that we label game framing. We hypothesize that the more that lawyers view negotiation through a game frame—that is, the more they view negotiation as an adversarial context with arbitrary and artificial rules—the less honest they will be in situations in which honest disclosure is not mandated by professional rules of conduct. We further hypothesize that lawyers with higher levels of moral character will apply a game frame to negotiation to a lesser degree than will lawyers with lower levels of moral character, and that honesty when negotiating will be higher when lawyers have higher versus lower levels of moral character. Our study results support these hypotheses. This work suggests that focusing on game‐like aspects of negotiation can induce a less moral and ethical mindset. To the extent that teaching law students to “think like a lawyer” encourages them to adopt a game frame of negotiation, we can expect such training to reduce the likelihood of honest disclosure.