Good people do bad things: How anxiety promotes unethical behavior through intuitive and automatic processing

Although researchers have found that emotions affect unethical behavior, few studies have uncovered the mechanism between anxiety and unethical behavior. The present study investigated how anxiety might influence unethical behavior based on the dual-process theory. In Experiment 1, a recall writing task was used to induce anxiety, and unethical behavior was assessed during an Interaction Task. Results showed that compared with participants who felt neutral emotions, those who felt anxiety were more likely to act unethically. In Experiment 2, we induced emotions by having participants watch videos and measured unethical behavior through a visual perception task. The results replicated findings in Experiment 1 and found that intuitive and automatic processing mediated the relationship between anxiety and unethical behavior. Collectively, our work reveals that anxiety might increase unethical behavior because individuals who feel anxious are more likely to engage in intuitive automatic processing that shifts attention from moral standards to self-interest, and thus to behave unethically. Both theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.