Summary
Following adolescents across three time points reveals how honesty-humility and misconduct can shape each other—and why person-level and within-person findings must be distinguished.
At a glance
A two-year study of more than 1,600 high school students found a reciprocal relationship: lower honesty-humility predicted more unethical behavior, and unethical behavior subsequently predicted lower honesty-humility. Misconduct also predicted later moral disengagement at both the between-person and within-person levels. However, moral disengagement predicted later misconduct only at the between-person level, and its within-person mediating effect was not significant.
Building on the Big Five, the HEXACO model draws on a broader range of linguistic and cultural settings and adds a sixth dimension: honesty-humility. Compared with the Big Five, honesty-humility has greater explanatory power for certain behaviors, including workplace deviance and prosocial conduct. Previous cross-sectional research has found that it significantly and negatively predicts unethical behavior among both adults and adolescents. From a longitudinal developmental perspective, however, does honesty-humility continue to drive adolescents to engage in more unethical behavior? Do adolescents who repeatedly engage in such behavior become less honest and humble over time? And what mechanisms might explain these relationships?
To answer these questions, the Prosociality Lab research team followed more than 1,600 high school students for two years. At three time points, the researchers used the HEXACO personality inventory, a moral disengagement scale, and an unethical behavior questionnaire to measure honesty-humility, moral disengagement, and unethical behavior, respectively. They then applied both a traditional cross-lagged panel model and a random-intercept cross-lagged panel model to examine the evolving relationships among the three variables.
The Reciprocal Relationship Between Honesty-Humility and Unethical Behavior
The corresponsive principle of personality development proposes that particular personality traits, such as honesty-humility, lead people to encounter or participate in particular life events, such as engaging in unethical behavior. Those experiences, in turn, can alter personality traits so that they become more consistent with what the person has experienced. Honesty-humility and unethical behavior may therefore influence each other in both directions.
Our results supported this reciprocal relationship. At both the between-person and within-person levels, honesty-humility negatively predicted unethical behavior; in the other direction, engaging in more unethical behavior also led to lower honesty-humility.
This means that honesty-humility affects unethical behavior not only through trait-level differences between people but also through changes unfolding within the same person. Adolescents may receive certain “benefits” from behaving unethically. Beyond immediate gains, such behavior may bring them more friends—what might colloquially be called bad company—or greater prestige through elevated status within a deviant peer group. Continued exposure to these “benefits” can reinforce an adolescent’s unethical behavioral pattern and gradually foster a personality tendency marked by lower honesty-humility.
The Reciprocal Relationship Between Moral Disengagement and Unethical Behavior
Drawing on social cognitive theory, we examined the reciprocal relationship between moral disengagement and unethical behavior. Moral disengagement refers to the cognitive strategies people use to defend and thereby rationalize unethical conduct.
At the between-person level, moral disengagement longitudinally predicted unethical behavior. At the within-person level, however, an increase in an adolescent’s own moral disengagement did not predict that adolescent’s unethical behavior over the following year. This suggests that the longitudinal effect of moral disengagement on unethical behavior operates more like a trait effect: adolescents with higher trait levels of moral disengagement are more likely than their peers to engage in unethical behavior one year later.
At the same time, results at both the between-person and within-person levels showed that unethical behavior longitudinally predicted moral disengagement. Repeated involvement in unethical behavior therefore makes adolescents increasingly accustomed to using moral disengagement strategies to excuse themselves, while also negatively affecting the development of their moral self-regulation.
The Dynamic Relationships Among Honesty-Humility, Moral Disengagement, and Unethical Behavior
We further tested the longitudinal developmental relationships among honesty-humility, moral disengagement, and unethical behavior. Both the within-person and between-person analyses showed that lower honesty-humility predicted subsequent increases in unethical behavior, which in turn led to increased moral disengagement. This finding supports the justification perspective: adolescents low in honesty-humility may engage in moral disengagement only after acting unethically, rather than using moral disengagement before the act.
The study also found a significant between-person mediating effect of moral disengagement: at that level, moral disengagement could explain how low honesty-humility longitudinally predicted unethical behavior. The corresponding within-person mediating effect, however, was not significant. One possible reason is that mediation by moral disengagement found in earlier research arose primarily from differences between individuals. Another is that by middle to late adolescence, moral disengagement may function more like a stable trait. Changes in an individual adolescent’s honesty-humility may therefore be insufficient to produce changes in that same adolescent’s moral disengagement over the following year, leaving the within-person mediating effect nonsignificant.
Implications
The findings of this study offer several implications:
- Lower honesty-humility leads adolescents to engage in more unethical behavior. Because adolescence is the most critical period for the development of personality, moral character, and social functioning, parents and educators should give careful attention to cultivating honesty-humility. They can do so through constructive educational approaches such as providing autonomy support and encouraging children to learn self-compassion, as discussed in the earlier post “Can a Fulfilled Sense of Self Reduce Unethical Behavior?”
- Honesty-humility and moral disengagement are changeable rather than entirely fixed. At the within-person level, both may be altered by unethical behavior. Parents and teachers therefore need to pay attention not only to adolescents’ conduct but also to the environments in which unethical behavior occurs. Intervention programs that reduce unethical behavior or increase prosocial behavior can help adolescents develop positive personality traits and moral qualities.
- At the between-person level, adolescents’ moral disengagement longitudinally predicts unethical behavior. Adolescents with a strong trait tendency toward moral disengagement should be helped to recognize what is wrong with this form of rationalization and guided toward sound moral self-regulation mechanisms, including the self-compassion skills mentioned above, so that their unethical behavior can be reduced.
Honesty-humility is the personality trait of maintaining fairness and sincerity when interacting with others. Research has found that it consistently and negatively predicts unethical behavior among adolescents, yet earlier studies rarely examined the relationship between personality and unethical behavior from a longitudinal developmental perspective. In a recent study published in the Journal of Research in Personality, the Prosociality Lab followed adolescents across three time points over two years and combined within-person and between-person analyses to reveal the dynamic developmental relationship between honesty-humility and unethical behavior.
Frequently asked questions
What relationship did the study find between honesty-humility and unethical behavior?
At both the between-person and within-person levels, lower honesty-humility predicted more unethical behavior. In the other direction, engaging in more unethical behavior also led to lower honesty-humility.
Did moral disengagement predict later unethical behavior?
At the between-person level, adolescents with higher trait levels of moral disengagement were more likely than their peers to engage in unethical behavior one year later. Within the same adolescent, however, an increase in moral disengagement did not predict unethical behavior over the following year.
Did unethical behavior predict later moral disengagement?
Yes. At both the between-person and within-person levels, unethical behavior longitudinally predicted moral disengagement, suggesting that repeated misconduct can make self-exonerating strategies more habitual.
Did moral disengagement mediate the relationship between honesty-humility and unethical behavior?
The mediating effect was significant at the between-person level but not at the within-person level. The source suggests that stable individual differences and the relatively trait-like nature of moral disengagement in middle to late adolescence may help explain this difference.
