The Double-Edged Sword of Loyalty

Loyalty has long been associated with being moral and upstanding, but recent research has begun documenting how loyalty can lead us to do unethical things. Here we offer an integrative perspective that explains when and why loyalty leads to both ethical and unethical outcomes. We suggest that a variety of bottom-up and top-down psychological processes lead us to be loyal to people and organizations we have obligations to, and that these processes operate in ways that reduce the cognitive dissonance that we experience in situations in which our loyalties conflict with other moral principles. In this article, we articulate what loyalty is, describe the typical objects of our loyalty, explain the mental processes involved in navigating loyalty dilemmas, and end by offering an integrative perspective that illuminates why loyalty leads to both ethical and unethical outcomes.