Supervisors: Panos Mitkidis & Stefan Pfattheicher (PSYK)
Discussants: Irene Pollach & Sascha Steinmann

Abstract
Despite being a pivotal aspect of human cooperation, only few studies within the field of collaborative dishonesty have included communication between participants, and no studies have yet experimentally compared this to non-communicative contexts. As a result, the impact of communication on unethical collaborations remains unclear. To address this gap, we conducted two well-powered studies (Ntotal = 1,187), closely replicating and extending seminal research by O. Weisel & S. Shalvi. Proc. Natl. Sci. U.S.A. 112, 10651-10656 (2015), introducing communication as a manipulated variable within a dyadic cheating task. Across both studies, we found compelling evidence that communication increases the magnitude of cheating - even when coordination on the task is not allowed. Importantly, the effect of communication was linked to a stronger experienced collaboration among the communicating dyads, highlighting that communication is not only key to everyday ethically sound collaborations, but also to corrupt collaborations.

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