ABSTRACT
People generally want to do the right thing, but also desire the money, success, and the like that come from doing the wrong thing occasionally. We generally think of ourselves as good folks, and predict that in the future we will do the right thing when we run into moral challenges. Our “should” self will prevail. When remembering how we have acted in the past, we tend to remember having generally done the right thing. However, in the time between predicting the future and remembering the past, when it is time to act, the “want” self may dominate, causing us to act less ethically than we had predicted that we would (or may someday remember that we did).
