道德自我调节对亲社会行为和违规行为的影响

本文通过两个研究探讨道德自我调节对亲社会行为和违规行为的影响。研究一中,被试随机分为三组,分别抄写“正性特质词语”“负性特质词语”或“中性词语”,并回忆自己所经历的与关键词有关的事情。启动完成后,考察其捐助行为。结果发现,正性特质启动组被试愿意捐助的数目显著高于负性特质和中性词语启动组。研究二用同样的方法改变被试的道德自我知觉,然后对被试的作弊行为进行了考察。结果发现,正性特质启动组的作弊严重程度显著低于中性词语启动组,负性特质启动组的作弊发生率和作弊严重程度显著低于中性词语启动组。本研究表明,道德自我调节过程不一定遵循负反馈机制：虽然“道德净化效应”在本研究中得到了部分验证,但是我们的实验结果不符合“道德许可效应”的预期。     

Vicarious moral licensing: the influence of others' past moral actions on moral behavior

This article investigates the effect of others' prior nonprejudiced behavior on an individual's subsequent behavior. Five studies supported the hypothesis that people are more willing to express prejudiced attitudes when their group members' past behavior has established nonprejudiced credentials. Study 1a showed that participants who were told that their group was more moral than similar other groups were more willing to describe a job as better suited for Whites than for African Americans. In Study 1b, when given information on group members' prior nondiscriminatory behavior (selecting a Hispanic applicant in a prior task), participants subsequently gave more discriminatory ratings to the Hispanic applicant for a position stereotypically suited for majority members (Whites). In Study 2, moral self-concept mediated the effect of others' prior nonprejudiced actions on a participant's subsequent prejudiced behavior such that others' past nonprejudiced actions enhanced the participant's moral self-concept, and this inflated moral self-concept subsequently drove the participant's prejudiced ratings of a Hispanic applicant. In Study 3, the moderating role of identification with the credentialing group was tested. Results showed that participants expressed more prejudiced attitudes toward a Hispanic applicant when they highly identified with the group members behaving in nonprejudiced manner. In Study 4, the credentialing task was dissociated from the participants' own judgmental task, and, in addition, identification with the credentialing group was manipulated rather than measured. Consistent with prior studies, the results showed that participants who first had the opportunity to view an in-group member's nonprejudiced hiring decision were more likely to reject an African American man for a job stereotypically suited for majority members. These studies suggest a vicarious moral licensing effect.     

Exemplification: The self-presentation of moral character

How do people come to terms with moral self-presentations and disconfirming behaviors? Subjects were exposed to the self-presentation of either an exemplifier (presenting himself as morally virtuous) or a pragmatist (presenting himself as morally adaptable) and then learned whether the self-presenter had or had not cheated for self-serving reasons in an earlier experiment Subjects clearly distinguished between exploitativeness and hypocrisy in their attributions, and considered a cheating exemplifier more hypocritical and self-deluding, but less exploitative and devious than a cheating pragmatist A second experiment manipulated subjects' involvement with the cheating of an exemplifier and a pragmatist by making half of the subjects its victims As in Experiment 1, uninvolved subjects considered the cheating exemplifier more hypocritical and less exploitative than a cheating pragmatist, however, involved subjects (victims) considered a cheating exemplifier more hypocritical but no less exploitative than a cheating pragmatist The results are discussed in terms of strategic self-presentation and the attribution of moral character     

Moral credentialing by association: the importance of choice and relationship closeness

People express more prejudice if they have established their "moral credentials." Five studies explored the acquisition of moral credentials through associations with racial minorities, particularly close relationships that are personally chosen. Participants choosing to write about a positive experience with a Black person (Study 1) or Hispanic person (Study 2) subsequently expressed more preference for Whites and tolerance of prejudice than did other participants. In Study 3, the credentialing effect of choice was diminished when participants were given an incentive for that choice. Participants in Study 4 who wrote about a Black friend were more credentialed than those who wrote about a Black acquaintance, regardless of whether the experience was positive or negative. Study 5 suggested that participants strategically referred to close associations with minorities when warned of a future situation in which they might appear prejudiced.     

The “Epidemic” of Cheating Depends on Its Definition: A Critique of Inferring the Moral Quality of “Cheating in Any Form”

The incidence and moral implications of cheating depend on how it is defined and measured. Research that defines and operationalizes cheating as an inventory of acts, that is, “cheating in any form,” has often fueled concern that cheating is reaching “epidemic proportions.” Such inventory measures appear, however, to conflate moral and administrative conceptions of the problem. Inasmuch as the immorality of behavior is a function of moral judgment, academic misconduct is immoral only when it is intentional, and the greatest moral weight should be ascribed to violations that students judge to be the most “serious.”     

The effects of moral judgment and moral identity on moral behavior: an empirical examination of the moral individual

Recognizing limitations in classic cognitive moral development theory, several scholars have drawn from theories of identity to suggest that moral behavior results from both moral judgments and moral identity. The authors conducted 2 survey-based studies with more than 500 students and managers to test this argument. Results demonstrated that moral identity and moral judgments both independently influenced moral behavior. In addition, in situations in which social consensus regarding the moral behavior was not high, moral judgments and moral identity interacted to shape moral behavior. This interaction effect indicated that those who viewed themselves as moral individuals pursued the most extreme alternatives (e.g., never cheating, regularly cheating)--a finding that affirms the motivational power of a moral identity. The authors conclude by considering the implications of this research for both theory and practice.     

Gender,Steroids, and Fairness in Sport

This article examines and defends the claim that whether or not to cheat can be a genuine moral dilemma within the ethics of team sports. That is, although there is always something morally wrong in cheating there may also be moral reasons in its favour and thus some (and perhaps an overriding) duty to cheat. This is based on the duty that players have of not letting down their teammates by failing to make sufficient effort to achieve victory. In considering the normative limits to such efforts, it is argued that players could reasonably be morally criticised for not cheating where this is of a kind commonly practised in their sport. Evidence is found in the attitudes to cheating of those connected with sport to suggest that some of it is regarded as part of the game, though in a sense that does not undermine its status as genuine cheating. In conclusion a brief consideration is given to the implications for the education, training and character of players, given a belief in there being moral reasons for cheating.     

University Students’ Perceptions of Academic Cheating: Triangulating Quantitative and Qualitative Findings

Using a parallel mixed-methods design, the current study examined university students’ perceptions of academic cheating through collecting and analyzing both the quantitative and qualitative data. Our quantitative findings corroborate previous research that male students have engaged more in academic cheating than females based on students’ self-reports, and that undergraduate students are less willing to discuss issues on academic cheating as compared with their graduate counterparts. Five themes emerged from the thematic analysis of the qualitative data: (1) flexible definitions for cheating, (2) environmental promotion of cheating, (3) the moral transgression of cheating, (4) cheating as an ambiguous justification, and (5) cheating as a conscious decision making process. The mixed-methods findings indicate that there is no relationship between students’ gender or classification and their endorsements of the qualitative themes. However, non-White students are more likely to endorse the theme “cheating as an ambiguous justification.” Implications for reducing and preventing academic cheating at the university level are discussed.     

Ethical Antecedents of Cheating Intentions: Evidence of Mediation

Although the pedagogy literature indicates significant relationships between cheating intentions and both personal and situational factors, no published research has examined the joint effect of personal moral philosophy and perceived moral intensity components on students’ cheating intentions. Hence, a structural equation model that relates magnitude of consequences, relativism, and idealism to willingness to cheat, is developed and tested. Using data from undergraduate business students, the empirical results provide insight into these relationships and evidence of mediation for magnitude of consequences on idealism and students’ cheating intentions. Implications for educators are offered.     

The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating

Does moral behavior draw on a belief in free will? Two experiments examined whether inducing participants to believe that human behavior is predetermined would encourage cheating. In Experiment 1, participants read either text that encouraged a belief in determinism (i.e., that portrayed behavior as the consequence of environmental and genetic factors) or neutral text. Exposure to the deterministic message increased cheating on a task in which participants could passively allow a flawed computer program to reveal answers to mathematical problems that they had been instructed to solve themselves. Moreover, increased cheating behavior was mediated by decreased belief in free will. In Experiment 2, participants who read deterministic statements cheated by overpaying themselves for performance on a cognitive task; participants who read statements endorsing free will did not. These findings suggest that the debate over free will has societal, as well as scientific and theoretical, implications.     

Sweeping dishonesty under the rug: how unethical actions lead to forgetting of moral rules

Dishonest behavior can have various psychological outcomes. We examine whether one consequence could be the forgetting of moral rules. In 4 experiments, participants were given the opportunity to behave dishonestly, and thus earn undeserved money, by over-reporting their performance on an ability-based task. Before the task, they were exposed to moral rules (i.e., an honor code). Those who cheated were more likely to forget the moral rules after behaving dishonestly, even though they were equally likely to remember morally irrelevant information (Experiment 1). Furthermore, people showed moral forgetting only after cheating could be enacted but not before cheating (Experiment 2), despite monetary incentives to recall the rules accurately (Experiment 3). Finally, moral forgetting appears to result from decreased access to moral rules after cheating (Experiment 4).     

The impact of moral theories on cheating

This research series began as a test of an emotion-attribution approach to moral behavior. However, in the early studies, college students who read about morality were subsequently more likely to cheat on a vocabulary test than were control subjects who read materials irrelevant to morality. We hypothesized that resentment toward the test constructors interacted with the moral schemas activated by the reading task. To reduce resentment, in Study III the vocabulary test was presented as the experimenter's doctoral research. As predicted, compared to controls, those subjects who read about morality cheated less. Study IV was a quasi-experiment that confirmed the hypothesized resentment differences between Study III and the earlier studies. In Study V, while two groups read about morality, one group read an internal emotion-attribution passage and the other read an external version; less cheating was observed in the internal condition than in the external or control conditions. The results indicate that even when moral schemas are elicited under conditions favoring moral behavior, those schemas will lead to reduced cheating most effectively under conditions in which subjects attribute their emotional arousal to their own behavior rather than to external causes. Issues of moral schema activation and emotion-attribution in moral behavior are discussed.     

Hearing about a story character's negative emotional reaction to having been dishonest causes young children to cheat less

There is extensive research on the development of cheating in early childhood but research on how to reduce it is rare. The present preregistered study examined whether telling young children about a story character's emotional reactions towards cheating could significantly reduce their tendency to cheat (N = 400; 199 boys; Age: 3–6 years). Results showed that telling older kindergarten children about the story character's negative emotional reaction towards rule violation significantly reduced cheating, but telling them about the positive emotional reaction towards rule adherence did not. These results show that children as young as age 5 are able to use information about another child's emotional reaction to guide their own moral behavior. In particular, highlighting another child's negative emotional reaction towards a moral transgression may be an effective way to reduce cheating in early childhood. This finding, along with earlier cheating reduction findings, suggests that although cheating is common in early childhood, simple methods can reduce its occurrence.     

Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Cheating: The Influence of Direct Knowledge and Attitudes on Academic Dishonesty

What effect does witnessing other students cheat have on one's own cheating behavior? What roles do moral attitudes and neutralizing attitudes (justifications for behavior) play when deciding to cheat? The present research proposes a model of academic dishonesty which takes into account each of these variables. Findings from experimental (vignette) and survey methods determined that seeing others cheat increases cheating behavior by causing students to judge the behavior less morally reprehensible, not by making rationalization easier. Witnessing cheating also has unique effects, controlling for other variables.     

Unable to resist temptation: How self-control depletion promotes unethical behavior

Across four experimental studies, individuals who were depleted of their self-regulatory resources by an initial act of self-control were more likely to “impulsively cheat” than individuals whose self-regulatory resources were intact. Our results demonstrate that individuals depleted of self-control resources were more likely to behave dishonestly (Study 1). Depletion reduced people’s moral awareness when they faced the opportunity to cheat, which, in turn, was responsible for heightened cheating (Study 2). Individuals high in moral identity, however, did not show elevated levels of cheating when they were depleted (Study 3), supporting our hypothesis that self-control depletion increases cheating when it robs people of the executive resources necessary to identify an act as immoral or unethical. Our results also show that resisting unethical behavior both requires and depletes self-control resources (Study 4). Taken together, our findings help to explain how otherwise ethical individuals predictably engage in unethical behavior.     

Sharing economy promotes morality,not impedes it

Sharing economy (SE) is a rapidly growing economic model which has brought people efficiency and convenience; however, it also provides users the opportunity to misbehave, which has raised public concerns about the moral crisis that it might cause. We examined the effect of SE on individuals’ unethical behaviors through four studies. We found consistently that making people believe that they were using shared goods (Study 1) or priming them with abstract SE mindsets (Studies 2–4) reduced, not facilitated, their subsequent cheating on task performances to gain monetary rewards. Moreover, the effect of SE on cheating was mediated by a sense of connecting to others (Study 4). Thinking of using SE enhanced individuals’ interpersonal closeness, which in turn led to less unethical behavior. However, correlational analyses in Studies 3 and 4 showed that people who cheated more in studies in the laboratory also reported using SE more frequently in real life. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Exploring the Judgment–Action Gap: College Students and Academic Dishonesty

This study examined differences between university students who were caught and sanctioned for cheating, students admitting to cheating but who were not caught, and students reporting that they had never cheated. Our findings showed that noncheaters are older, have better grade point averages, and have more sophisticated moral and epistemological reasoning skills. Qualitative analyses revealed that denial of responsibility and injury were the most common neutralization techniques and differed between the sanctioned and self-reported cheaters. We discuss the need to examine the extent to which reasoning skills have a causal impact on cheating behaviors.     

The Effects of Instructor Fear Appeals and Moral Appeals on Cheating-Related Attitudes and Behavior of University Students

Little attention has been paid in academic dishonesty literature to empirically testing the effectiveness of different instructor communication strategies to minimize cheating. Using a quasi-experimental design, we compared the effectiveness of instructor fear appeals and moral appeals on student cheating-related attitudes and behavior. Cheating was most strongly associated with neutralizing attitudes in the moral appeal condition. Also, the relationship between observation of others cheating and self-reported cheating behaviors was stronger in both treatment conditions than in the control condition. Although a trend toward less cheating in the treatment conditions was evident, it did not attain statistical significance.     

The Theory of Planned Behavior as a Model of Academic Dishonesty in Engineering and Humanities Undergraduates

This study examines the use of a modified form of the theory of planned behavior in understanding the decisions of undergraduate students in engineering and humanities to engage in cheating. We surveyed 527 randomly selected students from three academic institutions. Results supported the use of the model in predicting ethical decision-making regarding cheating. In particular, the model demonstrated how certain variables (gender, discipline, high school cheating, education level, international student status, participation in Greek organizations or other clubs) and moral constructs related to intention to cheat, attitudes toward cheating, perceptions of norms with respect to cheating, and ultimately cheating behaviors. Further the relative importance of the theory of planned behavior constructs was consistent regardless of context, whereas the contributions of variables included in the study that were outside the theory varied by context. Of particular note were findings suggesting that the extent of cheating in high school was a strong predictor of cheating in college and that engineering students reported cheating more frequently than students in the humanities, even when controlling for the number of opportunities to do so.     

Individualism Reconsidered: Readings Bearing on the Endangered Self in Modern Society/The Endangered Self (Books)

Protestants, relative to Jews, consider thoughts about immoral actions to be immoral and more likely to lead to action. In Study 1, controlling for agreement that thoughts lead to actions did not eliminate the effect of religion on agreement that thoughts have moral status. Protestants also considered thoughts about cheating on an exam (which Jews and Protestants consider equally likely) and thoughts about having an affair with Julia Roberts (an unlikely event) more morally relevant than Jews (Studies 2 &; 3), The studies suggest that likelihood of action differences are only a partial account of Jewish-Protestant differences in the moral relevance of thoughts.