Narrating the other: Self-other agreement of affective qualities and manifest events among personal life stories and the vicarious life stories provided by informants

Life stories are psychosocial constructions of one’s past, present, and future. Vicarious stories are mental representations of others’ life stories. Across two studies, we examined self-other agreement among features of participants’ personal and vicarious stories and whether agreement corresponded with relationship closeness. Agreement was quantified via the affective qualities and manifest events of key scenes. Targets’ personal and informants’ vicarious stories demonstrated agreement in tone, but not in redemption or contamination (Study 1). The manifest events within informants’ vicarious scenes corresponded with participants’ personal life stories 25% of the time, and this agreement increased with greater relationship closeness (Study 2). Our findings support the notion that an understanding of the important events in someone’s life may facilitate interpersonal closeness.     

Do we feel the same level of guilt about the wrongdoings of close ones and distant ones? The mediating role of behavioural control

Understanding whether and why individuals' emotional responses are different to the same behaviour performed by different others is important for understanding phenomena in social interaction. Given that there is no relevant research in Eastern culture testing such issues, the present research including two studies was conducted with Chinese samples and investigated whether Easterners experience more vicarious guilt about close ones' immoral behaviours than distant ones' immoral behaviours and the underlying mechanism of the effect. Study 1 showed that people felt more guilty when recalling close ones' misdeeds than distant ones' misdeeds. Study 2 replicated the findings of Study 1 using the scenario method and demonstrated that behavioural control partially mediated the effect of relationship closeness on vicarious guilt, that is, people reported more behavioural control over close ones' immoral behaviours, which in turn resulted in more vicarious guilt. Implications for social interaction and directions for future research are discussed.     

绿色消费的许可效应：绿色让我们更不道德？

绿色消费属于道德范畴,消费者在助推绿色社会发展中的作用日益受到重视。然而,绿色消费会降低指定性道德约束或增强禁止性道德选择,消费者会变得不再绿色甚至自私(如享乐、撒谎或偷窃),这便是绿色消费的许可效应。从时间维度上来说,绿色消费许可效应的产生包括启动效应-绿色消费-许可效应三个阶段。有关该效应的理论解释是道德自我调节。从根本上来说,化解该效应需要消费者养成绿色生活方式,它包括两个路径：一方面,从绿色行为到绿色自我,抽象化表征行为,将绿色行为与自我概念相连接,采用自下而上加工方式实现;另一方面,从绿色自我到绿色行为,基于价值观-行为一致性原则,会促进个体产生更多绿色消费以及节俭和利他,采用的是自上而下加工。文章最后指出未来一些研究方向。     

Vicarious shame

We examined an account of vicarious shame that explains how people can experience a self-conscious emotion for the behaviour of another person. Two divergent processes have been put forward to explain how another's behaviour links to the self. The group-based emotion account explains vicarious shame in terms of an in-group member threatening one's social identity by behaving shamefully. The empathy account explains vicarious shame in terms of empathic perspective taking; people imagine themselves in another's shameful behaviour. In three studies using autobiographical recall and experimental inductions, we revealed that both processes can explain why vicarious shame arises in different situations, what variation can be observed in the experience of vicarious shame, and how all vicarious shame can be related to a threat to the self. Results are integrated in a functional account of shame.     

Psychological distance reduces the effect of internalized stigma on mental health treatment decisions

Although stigma is a major barrier to treatment for those with mental health concerns, it is poorly understood when stigma is more or less influential in mental health treatment decisions. In the current work, we examined whether psychological distance—the removal of an event from direct experience—reduced the influence of internalized stigma on willingness to seek treatment. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that psychological distance versus proximity (e.g., seeking treatment in three months vs. in two days, respectively) decreases the negative influence of stigma on willingness to seek treatment. We focused on a population for whom mental health treatment decisions are personally-relevant: individuals who had previously sought mental health treatment. Experiment 1 showed that the extent to which these individuals internalized (i.e., personally endorsed) stigma about mental illness predicted lower intentions to make an appointment with a mental health care provider for themselves (but not another person). Experiment 2 replicated this result using a different measure of psychological distance (temporal distance) and extended this finding to behavior (time spent reading mental health resources). Overall, this research demonstrated that internalized stigma disrupts mental health treatment-seeking intentions and behaviors when they are psychologically proximal, but not when they are distant. Potential applications of these results are discussed.     

Family Unpredictability and Psychological Distress in Early Adulthood: The Role of Family Closeness and Coping Mechanisms

Unpredictability within the family environment has been consistently linked to anxiety and depressive symptomology in early adulthood. The current investigation sought to examine how individual and family factors may serve to protect college students from the potentially detrimental effects of growing up with family chaos. A multi-dimensional survey, including measures assessing family unpredictability, coping behavior, anxiety, and depressive symptoms, was administered to 260 (68% female) undergraduate college students. A series of regression models found mediating and moderating effects: the relationship between family unpredictability and psychological distress was explained in part by less family closeness, and this was especially true among students who engaged in more emotion-focused coping. Individuals who used less emotion-focused coping did not appear to suffer from psychological distress associated with family unpredictability. Conversely, task-focused coping did not moderate the association between family unpredictability and psychological distress; yet, individuals who used more task-focused coping, in general, experienced less distress. These findings could be used to inform intervention efforts targeted at improving parenting and caregiving practices as well as the development of campus programs aimed at improving students’ coping strategies.     

Optimism and Coping with Unemployment among Hong Kong Chinese Women

The effects of dispositional optimism and coping on the link between unemployment and psychological health were studied among 79 employed and 104 unemployed Hong Kong Chinese women. Results indicated that optimism, indexed by the Chinese version of the Revised Life Orientation Test (C-RLOT), moderated the effect of unemployment on psychological health. The less optimistic women were more psychologically impaired by losing their jobs. Among the unemployed women, the more optimistic ones and those who were more able to distance themselves from job loss fared better. Nevertheless, coping did not mediate the connection between optimism and psychological outcomes. These findings suggest that optimism is an important personal resource for coping with unemployment in Hong Kong Chinese, but whether coping mediates the effects of optimism on psychological health or not depends on other contextual factors. Ways to ensure more reliable prediction regarding the connections between optimism, coping and psychological health in future research were discussed.     

Seeing ‘the dark passenger’ – Reflections on the emotional trauma of conducting post-disaster research

This paper acknowledges ‘the [my] dark passenger’ of emotional vicarious trauma associated with conducting post-disaster research. Post-disaster research is tightly bounded by ethics and professional codes of conduct requiring us to be vigilant about the impact of our work on our participants. However, as a disaster researcher, I have been affected by vicarious trauma. ‘Direct personal’ vicarious trauma is where I experienced trauma associated with witnessing devastation making a professional separation from my objective subjects impossible. ‘Indirect professional’ vicarious trauma occurred when PhD students and others under my supervision that I sent to disaster affected places, experienced significant negative emotional responses and trauma as they interviewed their participants. In these situations, I became traumatised by my lack of training and reflected on how the emphasis on the participants came at the expense of the researcher in my care. Limited literature exists that focuses on the vicarious trauma experienced by researchers, and their supervisors working in post-disaster places and this paper is a contribution to that body of scholarship. In acknowledging and exploring the emotions and vicarious trauma of researchers embedded in landscapes of disaster, it becomes possible for future researchers to pre-empt this phenomenon and to consider ways that they might manage this.     

Are Children's Concerns About Punishment Related to Their Aggression?

Although moral reasoning is recognized as an influence on students' behavior, it is often overlooked in policies and interventions developed to change their behavior. Relations between specific types of moral reasoning (i.e., imminent, probable, physical, and psychological) and teacher-reported overt aggression were examined in 203 first and second graders. Regression analyses indicated that psychological reasoning explained a significant amount of the variance in overt aggression. Follow-up analyses indicated that overtly aggressive boys demonstrated more concern for the imminent consequences of their behavior on themselves (e.g., punishment) and less concern for the psychological consequences of their actions on others (e.g., hurting others' feelings) than nonaggressive boys. Implications for the prevention and treatment of aggressive behavior are discussed.     

“I Choked Her But I Did Not Punch Her”: Constructions of Intimate Partner Violence Among Men in the Philippines

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a phenomenon that is persistent in society and exacts a heavy psychological toll on women and children victimized by it. This research aims to understand how doers of intimate partner violence construe or perceive their alleged violent behavior. This study focuses on fifteen men with cases of Republic Act of 9262 or the Anti-Violence Against Women for physical, psychological, economic and/or sexual abuse in Surigao del Sur, Philippines. Participants were interviewed on their perception of intimate partner violence and the factors that led to their alleged violent behavior. Thematic network analysis yielded five global themes to explain that there are different yet inter-related causations of violence according to the participants: (1) act of IPV as a cognitive dissonance; (2) socio-economic condition as primary source of conflict; (3) blaming partner as the problem; (4) IPV as an impulsive and emotional response; and (5) ineffective conflict resolution. The doers position themselves to be intrinsically good people who denounce the act of violence, however, to compensate their contradicting behavior, they minimize the consequence of behavior and negate responsibility through different mechanisms of moral disengagement. Given the results, the research stresses the importance of a rehabilitation program that targets moral disengagement, anger management and effective conflict resolution.     

Moral tribalism and its discontents: How intuitive theories of ethics shape consumers' deference to experts

We study the psychology at the intersection of two social trends. First, as markets become increasingly specialized, consumers must increasingly defer to outside experts to decide among complex products. Second, people divide themselves increasingly into moral tribes, defining themselves in terms of shared values with their group and often seeing these values as being objectively right or wrong. We tested how and why these tribalistic tendencies affect consumers' willingness to defer to experts. We find that consumers are indeed tribalistic in which experts they find convincing, preferring products advocated by experts who share their moral values (Study 1), with this effect generalizing across product categories (books and electronics) and measures (purchase intentions, information‐seeking, willingness‐to‐pay, product attitudes, and consequential choices). We also establish the mechanisms underlying these effects: because many consumers believe moral matters to be objective facts, experts who disagree with those values are seen as less competent and therefore less believable (Studies 2 and 3), with this effect strongest among consumers who are high in their belief in objective moral truth (Study 4). Overall, these studies seek not only to establish dynamics of tribalistic deference to experts but also to identify which consumers are more or less likely to fall prey to these tribalistic tendencies.     

On the ethics of psychological research

Three philosophical positions on the nature of ethics were examined and contrasted within the context of psychological research: (a) teleology, which involves the balancing of the costs and benefits associated with an action as a means of developing general ethical rules; (b) deontology, which involves the rational adherence to rigid, universal rules that hold irrespective of the situation or consequences; and (c) skepticism, which involves denying the ability to apply universal rules and asserting the individuality of moral codes. Two experiments investigated the degree to which judgments of the ethicality of psychological research are affected by the consequences of the research and judge's ethical ideology. Subjects judged experiments that investigated obedience to an authority as generally less moral and more threatening to the participants' dignity and welfare when the proportion of total obedience was high rather than low. The proportion of participants (10 vs 40%) who were described as “psychologically upset” by the research did not affect moral judgments. These results were obtained across two different obedience situations (Milgram's study and a Watergate study) and different subject populations (high school and college students, males and females). As suggested by philosophers, a judge's ethical ideology determined how the perceived benefits and costs of the research were correlated with moral judgments. Teleologists weighed scientific benefits heavily, deontologists weighed participants' costs heavily, and skeptics weighed both heavily.     

Evolutionary ethics and moral theory

Conclusion This example, like the others, demands further discussion. My conclusion must therefore remain modest: an agent-neutral theory of our moral competence is not biologically implausible. Agent-centered rules like tit-for-tat, prerogatives, special obligations, and duties not to harm others might be best regarded as belonging to the theory of moral performance rather than the theory of moral competence. For biologists who may think otherwise, the general argument of this essay is that any claims to the contrary must be based on more empirically well-developed theories of our moral competence and moral performance.More adequate theories of both kinds are worth developing, even if by themselves they determine nothing about how we ought to live our lives. Biology may help us understand the broad taxonomical categories of moral performance. It may also explain why, at the deepest levels of our moral thinking, we so easily slide into agent-neutral ways of reasoning. But how we ought to live our lives is something that must be determined by social experiment and moral argumentation. Discoveries regarding the empirical nature of morality cannot be made independently of the actual workings of our moral competence, which is itself only one factor in broader social and psychological processes that are capable of leading human beings down any number of more or less morally laudable paths.

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Belief about immutability of moral character and punitiveness toward criminal offenders

The present research examined the association between belief about immutability of moral character and punitiveness toward criminal offenders. Overall, participants who believed that moral character is immutable (entity theorists) were more punitive than those who believed that it is changeable (incremental theorists). More important, the present research identified two mediational paths: Entity theorists made more internal attribution of criminal behavior and held stronger expectation of offenders' recidivism, both of which in turn led to stronger punitiveness. Also, contrary to some researchers' speculation, entity theorists did not perceive less controllability in criminal behavior. Implications for implicit theory research and criminal justice research are discussed.     

Financial deprivation selectively shifts moral standards and compromises moral decisions

Previous research suggests people firmly value moral standards. However, research has also shown that various factors can compromise moral behavior. Inspired by the recent financial turmoil, we investigate whether financial deprivation might shift people’s moral standards and consequently compromise their moral decisions. Across one pilot survey and five experiments, we find that people believe financial deprivation should not excuse immoral conduct; yet when people actually experience deprivation they seem to apply their moral standards more leniently. Thus, people who feel deprived tend to cheat more for financial gains and judge deprived moral offenders who cheat for financial gains less harshly. These effects are mediated by shifts in people’s moral standards: beliefs in whether deprivation is an acceptable reason for immorality. The effect of deprivation on immoral conduct diminishes when it is explicit that immoral conduct cannot help alleviate imbalances in deprived actors’ financial states, when financial deprivation seems fair or deserved, and when acting immorally seems unfair.     

自私行为的传递效应

自私的传递效应指遭遇他人自私对待的个体也自私地对待无辜他人的现象。在这个过程中, 示范性规范、心理权利起着中介作用, 个体的公正敏感性、道德认同, 以及情境中的道德凸显和匿名性起着调节作用。已有研究多关注个体如何惩罚与报复直接伤害自己的自私者, 较少关注自私行为的受害者如何对待无辜的第三方。未来研究可关注他人自私如何通过影响个体的认知, 如普遍信任和道德判断, 进而影响其对待无辜者的态度与行为, 并且澄清情绪及共情在其中的作用。     

Moral hypocrisy: appearing moral to oneself without being so.

How can people appear moral to themselves when they fail to act morally? Two self-deception strategies were considered: (a) misperceive one's behavior as moral and (b) avoid comparing one's behavior with moral standards. In Studies 1 and 2 the authors documented the importance of the 2nd strategy but not the 1st. Among participants who flipped a coin to assign themselves and another participant "fairly" to tasks, even a clearly labeled coin that prevented misperception did not produce a fair result (Study 1). Inducing behavior-standard comparison through self-awareness did (Study 2). Study 3 qualified the self-awareness effect: When moral standards were not salient before acting, self-awareness no longer increased alignment of behavior with standards. Instead, it increased alignment of standards with behavior and produced less moral action. Overall, results showed 3 different faces of moral hypocrisy.     

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.