Throughout the paper, we employ Jones’s definition of unethical
behaviors as acts that have harmful effects on others and are
‘‘either illegal or morally unacceptable to the larger community”
(1991, p. 367).1 Based on this definition, examples of unethical
behaviors include violations of ethical norms or standards
(whether legal or not), stealing, cheating, and other forms of dishonesty.
The behavior studied in our experiments involves outright
stealing and cheating through the overstatement of performance
for personal monetary gain. These behaviors, both technically illegal
and morally unacceptable to the broader community, fall well
within Jones’s guidelines for unethical behavior.