Abstract
Favoring employees or candidates that have a personal relationship of any kind to the decision-maker over better qualified or performing adversaries is widely perceived as unfair, inappropriate and unethical especially in universalistic cultures. Consequently, favoritism and more specific forms like nepotism or cronyism have been condemned and different policies have been implemented to avoid, disclose, and sanction such discriminative behavior. While there is a broad literature on terms and biases of ethical decision-making that may explain deviations from ethical norms, empirical studies that analyze possible false positives are lacking. This study develops and empirically tests the hypothesis that different factors such as socialization and social pressure may lead to commonly held negative attitudes towards favoritism resulting in judgments that disregard counter-evidence and hence wrongly indicates favoritism. Using cross-sectoral survey data from 180 German managers with significant work experience, I propose and find evidence for a perception and judgment bias that leads to allegations of favoritism that may cause undesirable ethical and economic consequences. The paper contributes to theory development in the under-researched field of excessive ethics, explores ways to make use of the rich literature on managerial and ethical decision-making, and provides leads for future research.