“Humans care about morality. yet, they often engage in actions that contradict their moral self. unethical amnesia is observed when people do not remember or remember less vividly these actions. this paper explores two reasons why individuals may experience unethical amnesia. forgetting past unethical behavior may be motivated by purely hedonic or affective reasons, such as the willingness to maintain one’s moral self-image, but also by instrumental or strategic motives, in anticipation of future misbehavior. in a large-scale incentivized online experiment (n = 1, 322) using a variant of a mind game, we find that hedonic considerations are not sufficient to motivate the forgetting of past cheating behavior. this is confirmed in a follow-up experiment (n = 1, 005) in which recalls are elicited the same day instead of 3 wk apart. however, when unethical amnesia can serve as a justification for a future action, such as deciding on whether to keep undeserved money, motivated forgetting is more likely. thereby, we show that motivated forgetting occurs as a self-excuse to justify future immoral decisions.”

“Our memories of misdeed become less clear over time; this is known as unethical amnesia. recently, kouchaki and gino (proceedings of the national academy of sciences usa, 113(22), 6166-6171, 2016) explained that unethical amnesia occurs because of the psychological distress and discomfort such illegal acts cause (psychological mechanism). notably, unethical amnesia has two components: cognitive as well as emotion. authors have not explained the possible cognitive-emotional and neural mechanisms underlying unethical amnesia. to get the complete picture of unethical amnesia, i firmly believe that along with psychological mechanisms, it is essential to explain underlying cognitive-emotional and neural mechanisms, which is the primary focus of this paper. together, it will give real insight to the reader to understand this phenomenon.”

“Despite our optimistic belief that we would behave honestly when facing the temptation to act unethically, we often cross ethical boundaries. this paper explores one possibility of why people engage in unethical behavior over time by suggesting that their memory for their past unethical actions is impaired. we propose that, after engaging in unethical behavior, individuals’ memories of their actions become more obfuscated over time because of the psychological distress and discomfort such misdeeds cause. in nine studies (n = 2,109), we show that engaging in unethical behavior produces changes in memory so that memories of unethical actions gradually become less clear and vivid than memories of ethical actions or other types of actions that are either positive or negative in valence. we term this memory obfuscation of one’s unethical acts over time ‘unethical amnesia.’ because of unethical amnesia, people are more likely to act dishonestly repeatedly over time.”