Citation

Wu S, Liang J, Lin J, Cai W. PLoS One 2019; 14(6): e0218076.

Affiliation

School of Humanities and Management / Research Center for Quality of Life and Applied Psychology, Guangdong Medical University, Dongguan, China.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2019, Public Library of Science)

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0218076

PMID

31173620

Abstract

Previous studies have found that high social class individuals are more dishonest than low social class ones. However, the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon is still unclear. The "ignoring negative consequences" hypothesis suggests that belonging to a high social class makes individuals ignore the negative consequences of dishonesty, whereas the "self-focused" hypothesis suggests that belonging to a high social class makes individuals focus more on the self and self-interests. The present study aims to examine these two hypotheses by measuring participants' subjective social class, narcissism, fear of negative evaluation, and tendency to be dishonest. To this end, an online survey was conducted.

RESULTS provide evidence for the self-focused hypothesis by showing that subjective social class positively predicts the tendency to be dishonest, and narcissism plays a mediating role in this relationship.

Language: en