Who Deals With the Devil? Interdependence, Personality, and Corrupted Collaboration

Corrupted collaboration, that is, gaining personal profits through collaborative immoral acts, is a common and destructive phenomenon in societies. Despite the societal relevance of corrupted collaboration, the role of one’s own as well as one’s partner’s characteristics has hitherto remained unexplained. In the present study, we test these roles using the sequential dyadic die-rolling paradigm (N = 499 across five conditions). Our results indicate that interacting with a fully dishonest partner leads to higher cheating rates than interacting with a fully honest partner, although being paired with a fully honest partner does not eliminate dishonesty completely. Furthermore, we found that the basic personality dimension of Honesty–Humility is consistently negatively related to collaborative dishonesty irrespective of whether participants interact with fully honest or fully dishonest partners. Overall, our investigation provides new insights on the role of interaction partner’s characteristics in settings allowing for corrupted collaboration.