Organizational Moral Identity Centrality: Relationships with Citizenship Behaviors and Unethical Prosocial Behaviors

This article examines the influence of both individual and organizational moral identity centrality on prosocial behaviors. Furthermore, we hypothesize that the centrality of these two offer a substitute effect on these behavioral outcomes. Validated measures of organizational moral identity centrality and unethical prosocial behavior are introduced. Data were collected via two separate samples, University Greek Life organization members (n = 499) and restaurant workers (n = 137). Regression results supporting that individuals who claim centrality of moral identity and see their organizations to also embrace the centrality are more likely to engage in citizenship behaviors and less likely to commit unethical prosocial acts. Furthermore, results support that both forms of centrality of moral identity were substitutes in terms of affecting these two outcomes. Research that contributes to understanding how individuals within an organization consciously choose to act on behalf of the organization even when these very actions conflict with generally accepted morals of right and wrong within their society is valuable to academics and practitioners alike. This study contributes to this body of knowledge. Despite extensive attention to topics of ethics and identity, previous studies have largely overlooked the impact of an organizational moral identity. Our results provide a framework for understanding the role of moral identity and the prediction of organizational citizenship and unethical prosocial behaviors.     

Young children enforce social norms selectively depending on the violator's group affiliation

To become cooperative members of their cultural groups, developing children must follow their group's social norms. But young children are not just blind norm followers, they are also active norm enforcers, for example, protesting and correcting when someone plays a conventional game the "wrong" way. In two studies, we asked whether young children enforce social norms on all people equally, or only on ingroup members who presumably know and respect the norm. We looked at both moral norms involving harm and conventional game norms involving rule violations. Three-year-old children actively protested violation of moral norms equally for ingroup and outgroup individuals, but they enforced conventional game norms for ingroup members only. Despite their ingroup favoritism, young children nevertheless hold ingroup members to standards whose violation they tolerate from outsiders.     

Mad and glad: Musically induced emotions have divergent impact on morals

Moral judgments can be positive or negative: we can judge action as good or wrong. Here we show that good judgments and wrong judgments are influenced by incidental emotions. Using instrumental music as an induction method, we show that anger, but not happiness, increases the tendency to judge actions as wrong (Experiment 1). We also show that happiness increases the tendency to praise actions as both good and obligatory, while anger reduces these judgments (Experiment 2). These findings extend the literature on emotions and moral judgment by demonstrating impact of anger and happiness, and by contrasting goodness and wrongness in their emotional valence. The findings also show that music can have a significant impact on moral judgment. This is important because music is a highly prevalent situational variable. The use of instrumental music may have advantages over other induction techniques because it does not carry specific semantic cues that might encourage people to think about morality.     

Happiness: When does it lead to self-indulgence and when does it lead to self-denial?

Previous research on self-gratification in children has found that happiness, compared to a neutral affective state, sometimes causes self-indulgence and sometimes causes self-denial. Review of this research led to the hypothesis that happiness leads to self-indulgence when children have no reason to believe that excessive self-gratification is morally wrong but that happiness promotes selfdenial when children fear that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral rule. In the present study, children were first placed in either a happy or neutral mood. They were then given an opportunity to help themselves freely to a reward supply, but half the children in each affect condition were warned that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral rule whereas the other half were not. In the absence of information that excessive self-gratification would violate a moral standard, happiness produced self-indulgence, but when children were told that excessive self-gratification would be wrong, happy children denied themselves significantly more than neutral-mood children. It was suggested that happiness motivates children to try to sustain their elevated mood; the behavioral route to maintaining positive mood, however, depends on how children perceive the moral implications of their actions.     

遵守规范的动机对儿童过度模仿的影响

模仿非任务相关动作的行为被称为过度模仿。研究以94名4-6岁儿童为被试,通过操纵无关动作与结果之间的关系,考察了儿童遵守规范的动机对过度模仿的影响。结果发现,当遵守规范导致不能得到想要的结果时,儿童没有表现出明显的过度模仿;而当遵守规范与得到结果不冲突时,儿童过度模仿的比例显著增加。这些结果说明遵守规范的动机影响儿童的过度模行为,当遵守规范的动机降低时,过度模仿行为减少。     

Upsetting others and provoking ridicule: Children's reasoning about the self‐presentational consequences of rule violation

This study examined children's understanding of the distinctive ‘self‐presentational’ impacts of moral and social‐conventional rule violations. A sample of 80 children aged 7–8 and 9–10 years generated examples of interpersonal events that would upset others and events that would elicit social attention to the self. As expected, both age groups consistently identified moral violations as leading to the former, and deviations from social norms as leading to the latter. Crucially, when children were asked to identify the social‐evaluative consequences of those breaches, they exhibited a significant increase with age in recognizing the self‐presentational risks of social‐conventional deviations.     

TV heroes: The impact of rhetoric and deeds

Two experiments examined the influence of children's cartoons and their prosocial messages on the behavior and judgments of kindergarten, second, and fourth grade children. Three conditions or types of programs were used: purely prosocial (moral lesson but no aggression); and purely aggressive (no moral lesson). Behavioral, evaluative, and comprehension measures were taken. All children were able to distinguish the protagonist and antagonist. Older children grasped the implications of the stories but younger children, especially those in the prosocial/aggressive condition, did not. Scores of children in the prosocial/aggressive condition were significantly lower on message comprehension than those of subjects in the purely prosocial condition. Implications for the relationship of behaviors (prosocial actions) to judgments, portrayal of aggressive heroes on television programs, and the acceptance of aggression as normative behaviors, are discussed.     

The Moral Implications of Immorality

This essay focuses on the issue of immorality, an issue that has largely been understudied in anthropology. It examines two types of immoral behavior in contemporary Chinese society, drawing on cases widely agreed upon by ordinary people to be morally wrong. Next, it analyzes moral experiences and moral sentiments among individuals who either were victims of immoral acts or recalled their own feelings of being immoral. Ethnographic evidence shows that immorality tends to be intuitive and emotional in actual social actions but in recollections of moral experiences it is reflected upon with rational reasoning and justification. Immorality is essentially the violation of the social, which may explain why ordinary people use immorality to define and defend their social behavior in everyday life. The recent emphasis on moral reasoning and ethical choice in anthropological studies of moralities has overlooked the social in the moral as well as the role of moral sentiments and intuitions in social actions.     

Judging near and distant virtue and vice

We propose that people judge immoral acts as more offensive and moral acts as more virtuous when the acts are psychologically distant than near. This is because people construe more distant situations in terms of moral principles, rather than attenuating situation-specific considerations. Results of four studies support these predictions. Study 1 shows that more temporally distant transgressions (e.g., eating one’s dead dog) are construed in terms of moral principles rather than contextual information. Studies 2 and 3 further show that morally offensive actions are judged more severely when imagined from a more distant temporal (Study 2) or social (Study 3) perspective. Finally, Study 4 shows that moral acts (e.g., adopting a disabled child) are judged more positively from temporal distance. The findings suggest that people more readily apply their moral principles to distant rather than proximal behaviors.     

When ignorance is no excuse: Different roles for intent across moral domains

A key factor in legal and moral judgments is intent. Intent differentiates, for instance, murder from manslaughter. Is this true for all moral judgments? People deliver moral judgments of many kinds of actions, including harmful actions (e.g., assault) and purity violations (e.g., incest, consuming taboo substances). We show that intent is a key factor for moral judgments of harm, but less of a factor for purity violations. Based on the agent’s innocent intent, participants judged accidental harms less morally wrong than accidental incest; based on the agent’s guilty intent, participants judged failed attempts to harm more morally wrong than failed attempts to commit incest. These patterns were specific to moral judgments versus judgments of the agent’s control, knowledge, or intent, the action’s overall emotional salience, or participants’ ratings of disgust. The current results therefore reveal distinct cognitive signatures of distinct moral domains, and may inform the distinct functional roles of moral norms.     

Moral Desirability and Rational Decision

Being a formal and general as well as the most widely accepted approach to practical rationality, rational decision theory should be crucial for justifying rational morals. In particular, acting morally should also (nearly always) be rational in decision theoretic terms. After defending this thesis, in the critical part of the paper two strategies to develop morals following this insight are criticized: game theoretical ethics of cooperation and ethical intuitionism. The central structural objections to ethics of cooperation are that they too directly aim at the rationality of moral action and that they to do not encompass moral values or a moral desirability function. The constructive half of the paper takes up these criticisms by developing a two-part strategy to bring rationality and morals in line. The first part is to define ‘moral desirability’. This is done, using multi-attribute utility theory, by equating several adequate components of an individual’s comprehensive (rational) utility function with the moral desirability function. The second part is to introduce mechanisms, institutions, in particular socially valid moral norms, that provide further motivation for acting in accordance with morals.     

Utilitarian and emotion-related components of moral judgement: Gender and age effects and the relationship with prosocial and hostile roles in bullying

This study investigated the utilitarian and emotion-related components of morality, both as a function of gender and age and in relation to hostile vs. pro-social behaviors in bullying. We presented 45 primary and 62 middle school students with different types of moral and control dilemmas to assess their acceptance of utilitarian behaviors that did or did not violate moral norms (with high or low emotional involvement) in relation to their propensity to assume hostile and/or pro-social roles. We found greater acceptance of utilitarian solutions to dilemmas in boys, older children and those inclined to take on hostile roles. An inverse association was found between utilitarian styles and pro-social roles, particularly when utilitarian thinking violated a moral norm with high emotional involvement. We discuss these results in terms of different functioning styles in typically developing children.     

Three‐year‐old children intervene in third‐party moral transgressions

We investigated children's moral behaviour in situations in which a third party was harmed (the test case for possession of agent‐neutral moral norms). A 3‐year‐old and two puppets each created a picture or clay sculpture, after which one puppet left the room. In the Harm condition, the remaining (actor) puppet then destroyed the absent (recipient) puppet's picture or sculpture. In a Control condition, the actor acted similarly but in a way that did not harm the recipient. Children protested during the actor's actions, and, upon the recipient's return, tattled on the actor and behaved prosocially towards the recipient more in the Harm than in the Control condition. This is the first study to show that children as young as 3 years of age actively intervene in third‐party moral transgressions.     

Towards a new epistemology of moral progress

Abstract: Awareness that moral beliefs and practices have changed across time threatens our confidence in our current moral beliefs: if past moral beliefs turned out to be wrong, how can we be sure ours aren't likewise mistaken? In this paper, I set up four desiderata for a successful theory of moral progress: it must allow us to judge that progress has occurred, avoid the image of increasing correspondence towards ahistorical truthmakers, allow for revision in belief, and yet not be disobligating. Rorty's pragmatist account of moral progress delivers on the first three, but at the cost of failing to meet the fourth: it drains moral beliefs of their categorical force. I then outline K.E. Løgstrup's understanding of the relation between the ‘ethical demand’ and changing, socially mediated norms. While Løgstrup does posit an unchanging ground of normativity ‐ the “ethical demand” to act for the sake of the other whose welfare is in our hands – he also thinks that changing social norms are an indispensable part of ethical life. I argue that Løgstrup's discussion of the ‘refraction‘ of the ethical demand through changing social norms provides resources for an account of moral progress that fulfils these four desiderata.     

The contact principle and utilitarian moral judgments in young children

In three experiments involving 207 preschoolers and 28 adults, we investigated the extent to which young children base moral judgments of actions aimed to protect others on utilitarian principles. When asked to judge the rightness of intervening to hurt one person in order to save five others, the large majority of children aged 3 to 5 years advocated intervention in contrast to another situation with the reverse cost/benefit ratio. This course of action was seen as acceptable by most children only when it did not require the agent to have physical contact with the victim and the victim’s harm was intended to produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Overall, the children’s responses were remarkably similar to those reported in adult studies. These findings document the extent to which some constraints on moral judgment are present in early human development.     

Apologizing for Who I Am

Philosophical discussions of apologies have focused on apologizing for wrong actions. Such a focus overlooks an important dimension of moral failures, namely, failures of character. However, when one attempts to revise the standard account of apology to make room for failures of character, two objections emerge. The first is rooted in the psychology of shame. The second stems from the purported social function of apologies. This paper responds to these objections and, in so doing, sheds further light both on why we apologize (when we are in the wrong) and on why we accept apologies (when others are).     

9-11岁儿童对社会性害怕和内疚情绪的理解

社会性害怕和内疚都属于个体体验到的消极情绪,但这两种消极情绪对个体而言都有积极的社会意义,本研究采用临床访谈的方法,以9岁和11岁儿童为被试,探讨他们对内疚与社会性害怕这两种情绪的理解能力,结果发现,(1)随年龄的增长,9-11岁儿童对内疚情绪的理解能力不断提高,但儿童到了11岁仍然不能很好地理解内疚的第二、第三层次。(2)相对于模糊故事,在内疚故事中,儿童表现出更高的对内疚三个层次的理解。(3)两个年龄组的儿童都能很好地理解社会性害怕情绪。因而本研究认为,儿童对社会性害怕情绪的理解明显好于对内疚情绪的理解,且儿童对内疚的理解可能建立在对社会性害怕理解的基础上。     

Dianomy: understanding religious women's moral agency as creative conformity

This essay seeks to contribute to work on moral agency of religious women through the creative naming of a dynamic that is emerging in recent scholarship. Drawing on fieldwork in Iran in 2004, I argue that prominent models of agency based on autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy are unable take into account both religious influence on and individual creativity of women's actions. I propose the neologism, "dianomy," meaning dual-sources of the moral law, to account for moral agency that relies neither exclusively upon the self as a source of moral authority nor exclusively upon religious traditions. Dianomy also attempts to comprehend creative ruptures in obedience to tradition, even when these innovations are unintentional. Such a concept is particularly important in order to correct past tendencies to ignore or even negate feminist politics that do not resist or strategically reform religious norms. With dianomy, tactical moves, actions that are not "freely chosen," and even happy accidents can be studied as productive within traditional religious communities. I call these types of actions, which confound the actions theorized by autonomy, heteronomy, and theonomy, "creative conformity."     

不同目击者对儿童道德情绪判断与归因的影响

本研究考察不同权威目击者对儿童道德情绪判断与归因的影响。实验以90个7~8岁儿童为被试,采用3(行为情境)×3(目击权威类型)的组间设计,考察了不同权威目击者条件下儿童对不同行为者的道德情绪判断和归因。结果发现,目击权威的类型对儿童道德情绪判断与归因的影响在不同的行为情境条件下是不同的。成人权威目击条件下,儿童对亲社会行为者的道德情绪判断分数最高,即更多判断他们会感到高兴,对损人者的道德情绪判断分数最低,即更多判断他们会感到不高兴。而同龄权威和非权威目击条件下儿童对不同行为者的情绪判断分数不存在显著差异。不同权威目击条件下儿童对行为者的情绪归因存在显著差异,奖惩定向更多出现在成人权威目击条件。研究显示,成人权威对儿童道德情绪的培养具有重要意义,能够显著影响儿童的道德情绪判断与归因。