good illustration of ethical fading is a study that found that participants who cheated to get paid more money were more likely to have forgotten the honor code they had signed compared to those who did not cheat, even when they were paid extra to recall the moral rules accurately.32 Language euphemisms can play a role here, as people use linguistic metaphors that dampen the ethical implications of their decisions. Here is how psychologists Ann Tenbrunsel and David Messick explain this: “We engage in ‘aggressive’ accounting practices, not illegal ones. There may be some ‘externalities’
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