Always looking for a moral identity: The moral licensing effect in men convicted of domestic violence

People who act in accord with moral standards enjoy a strong moral self-concept, but people with a strong moral concept do not always behave morally: sometimes they exhibit consistent behaviors and sometimes compensatory behaviors. Through two studies, this paper shows that people who do wrong enjoy a stronger moral self-concept and regulate their moral behavior accordingly. Specifically, men in court-mandated psychological treatment for having employed violence against their partners manage to preserve a very positive moral self-concept. They also exhibit moral self-regulation: when prompted to consider their high moral self-concepts, they recalled performing significantly more prosocial behaviors in the previous year (consistency effect), and immediately following this, they relaxed their future intentions to act in prosocial manners over the next year (licensing effect). This novel connection between intimate partner violence and moral regulation allows us to observe the dark side of feeling too moral in a sensitive sample.     

Can Lonely People Behave Morally? The Joint Influence of Loneliness and Empathy on Moral Identity

We examine how loneliness moderates the effect of empathy on moral identity: the extent to which being a moral person is important to an individual's identity. Results of four studies show that only lonely people have increased moral identity when they have high (vs. low) empathy; empathy does not reliably increase moral identity for nonlonely people. We demonstrate these effects with psychological measures of moral identity as well as with downstream moral behaviors in various consumer settings. Our findings are consistent with the motivation theory of loneliness and empathy: Lonely people are capable, but are not motivated to empathize.     

女性面孔吸引力的加工及其对男性诚实道德行为的影响:一项ERP研究

研究考察了不同女性面孔吸引力情境对男性被试诚实道德决策行为的影响,同时采用ERP技术对社会情境中面孔吸引力的信息加工方式特点进行探究。结果发现,高面孔吸引力记录员情境中被试倾向更加真实地报告自己的预测结果而表现出更多诚实的道德决策;ERP结果则发现高吸引力记录员面孔较之于低吸引力记录员面孔在反应提示界面在大脑中后部诱发更大的早期N200成分。结果提示,在与面孔审美评价无关的社会情境中个体面孔的吸引力信息能够被快速识别与自动化加工,同时也会直接促进他人自身的道德行为水平。     

Depletion,moral identity,and unethical behavior: Why people behave unethically after self-control exertion

Self-control enables people to resist short-term temptations in the service of long-term goals. Previous exertion of self-control leads to a state of ego depletion. Three studies demonstrated that ego depletion leads to a high level of unethical behavior. These studies also hypothesized and confirmed that depleted individuals behave unethically because of low moral identity. Study 1 found that depleted participants were more likely to over-report their performance than non-depleted participants. Study 2 revealed that depletion reduced people’s moral identity, which in turn increased their propensity to engage in unethical behavior. Study 3 proved that priming moral identity eliminated the effect of depletion on cheating. Findings suggest that reduced moral identity accounts for the effect of self-control depletion on unethical behavior.     

Moral identity and the experience of moral elevation in response to acts of uncommon goodness

Four studies using survey and experimental designs examined whether people whose moral identity is highly self-defining are more susceptible to experiencing a state of moral elevation after being exposed to acts of uncommon moral goodness. Moral elevation consists of a suite of responses that motivate prosocial action tendencies. Study 1 showed that people higher (vs. lower) in moral identity centrality reported experiencing more intense elevating emotions, had more positive views of humanity, and were more desirous of becoming a better person after reading about an act of uncommon goodness than about a merely positive situation or an act of common benevolence. Study 2 showed that those high in moral identity centrality were more likely to recall acts of moral goodness and experience moral elevation in response to such events more strongly. These experiences were positively related to self-reported prosocial behavior. Study 3 showed a direct effect on behavior using manipulated, rather than measured, moral identity centrality. Study 4 replicated the effect of moral identity on the states of elevation as well as on self-reported physical sensations and showed that the elevation mediates the relationship between moral identity, witnessing uncommon goodness, and prosocial behavior.     

道德心理学的哲学思考--论心理学与伦理学的会通与融合

道德心理学把规范伦理学与实证心理学在哲学层面上结合起来,为理解人的道德行为提供了一种新的视角。伦理学与心理学的这种融合具体体现为：个人同一性与道德行为必须在心理上保持一致,才能形成真正的道德同一性,因此,美德有其独特的气质和情绪心理学机制。道德是在社会生活中形成的,处理好道德的社会关系是培养良好美德的基础。道德既有理性的层面,也有非理性的层面,培养和确立人的内在理性是成为道德人的心理学基础。基于心理学对道德生活的重要性,一种以心理学为基础的美德伦理学正在出现。     

Beliefs About the True Self Explain Asymmetries Based on Moral Judgment

Past research has identified a number of asymmetries based on moral judgments. Beliefs about (a) what a person values, (b) whether a person is happy, (c) whether a person has shown weakness of will, and (d) whether a person deserves praise or blame seem to depend critically on whether participants themselves find the agent's behavior to be morally good or bad. To date, however, the origins of these asymmetries remain unknown. The present studies examine whether beliefs about an agent's “true self” explain these observed asymmetries based on moral judgment. Using the identical materials from previous studies in this area, a series of five experiments indicate that people show a general tendency to conclude that deep inside every individual there is a “true self” calling him or her to behave in ways that are morally virtuous. In turn, this belief causes people to hold different intuitions about what the agent values, whether the agent is happy, whether he or she has shown weakness of will, and whether he or she deserves praise or blame. These results not only help to answer important questions about how people attribute various mental states to others; they also contribute to important theoretical debates regarding how moral values may shape our beliefs about phenomena that, on the surface, appear to be decidedly non‐moral in nature.     

Pursuing moral outrage: Anger at torture

Moral outrage—anger at violation of a moral standard—should be distinguished from anger at the harm caused by standard-violating behavior. Recent research that used experimental manipulation to disentangle these different forms of anger found evidence of personal and empathic anger, but not of moral outrage. We sought to extend this research by assessing anger at a more extreme moral violation: torture. If the person tortured is a member of one’s group (nationality), anger may not be over the moral violation but over the harm done to one of “us.” In an experiment designed to create the necessary appraisal conditions, we found clear evidence of identity-relevant personal anger (anger when a person from one’s nationality is tortured) but little evidence of moral outrage (anger even when a person from an identity-irrelevant nationality is tortured). Implications for understanding moral emotion and moral motivation are discussed.     

A grotesque and dark beauty: How moral identity and mechanisms of moral disengagement influence cognitive and emotional reactions to war

Two studies examine the extent to which moral identity and moral disengagement jointly drive reactions to war. Study 1 finds support for a hypothesized positive relationship between moral disengagement and the perceived morality of a highly punitive response to the perpetuators of the September 11th attacks. It also finds that this effect was eliminated for participants who place high self-importance on their moral identities. Study 2 finds that moral disengagement effectively reduced the extent to which participants experienced negative emotions in reaction to abuses of Iraqi detainees by American soldiers; however, the effectiveness of moral disengagement was negated when participants’ moral identities were primed.     

Moral dilemmas and moral rules

Recent work shows an important asymmetry in lay intuitions about moral dilemmas. Most people think it is permissible to divert a train so that it will kill one innocent person instead of five, but most people think that it is not permissible to push a stranger in front of a train to save five innocents. We argue that recent emotion-based explanations of this asymmetry have neglected the contribution that rules make to reasoning about moral dilemmas. In two experiments, we find that participants show a parallel asymmetry about versions of the dilemmas that have minimized emotional force. In a third experiment, we find that people distinguish between whether an action violates a moral rule and whether it is, all things considered, wrong. We propose that judgments of whether an action is wrong, all things considered, implicate a complex set of psychological processes, including representations of rules, emotional responses, and assessments of costs and benefits.     

‘We're all individuals’: group norms of individualism and collectivism,levels of identification and identity threat

Three studies were conducted to investigate the power of group norms of individualism and collectivism to guide self‐definition and group behavior for people with low and high levels of group identification. Study 1 demonstrates that in an individualist culture (North America), those who identify highly with their national identity are more individualist than low identifiers. In contrast, in a collectivist culture (Indonesia) high identifiers are less individualist than low identifiers. Study 2 manipulates group norms of individualism and collectivism, and shows a similar pattern on a self‐stereotyping measure: High identifiers are more likely to incorporate salient group norms prescribing individualism or collectivism into their self‐concept than low identifiers. Study 3 replicates this effect and shows that high identifiers conform more strongly to group norms, and self‐stereotype themselves in line with the salient norm than low identifiers when their group is threatened. Hence, the findings suggest that when there is a group norm of individualism, high identifiers may show individualist behavior as a result of conformity to salient group norms. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Moral spillovers: The effect of moral violations on deviant behavior

Two experiments investigated whether outcomes that violate people’s moral standards increase their deviant behavior (the moral spillover effect). In Study 1, participants with and without a moral mandate (i.e., a strong attitude rooted in moral conviction) read about a legal trial in which the outcome supported, opposed or was unrelated to their moral mandate. Relative to when outcomes supported moral mandates, when outcomes opposed moral mandates people judged the outcome to be less fair, were more angry, were less willing to accept the outcome, and were more likely to take a borrowed pen. In Study 2, participants who recalled another person’s moral violation were more likely to cheat on an experimental task relative to angry or neutral condition participants. Taken together, results provide evidence for moral spillover: outcomes that violate moral standards increase deviant behavior.     

小学儿童的道德行为及其与道德观念的相关——诚实原则和集体主义价值观冲突情境下的研究

研究探讨了585名7、9、11岁的小学儿童在诚实原则和集体主义价值观冲突的真实情境下的道德行为及其与道德观念的相关。结果表明,在诚实原则和集体主义价值观冲突情境下,小学儿童的道德行为主要受到诚实原则的支配,表现为:为集体说谎行为发生率都很低;随着年龄的增长,小学儿童的为集体说谎行为的发生率显著增高;小学儿童的为集体说谎行为不存在性别差异;7岁、9岁儿童的为集体说谎行为与集体观念无关,11岁儿童的为集体说谎行为与集体观念显著正相关。     

Moral expertise

We offer a theory of moral expertise based on an updated version of the Thomistic concept of habitus. We maintain that mature moral control arises from internalized standards of belief married to corresponding actions; the result is moral expertise. Beliefs and actions (conceptualized as habitus) coalesce in a moral identity, which is then sustained by the beliefs and actions that comprise the habitus; what we do affects who we are and what we believe, just as what we believe guides what we do. In support of these claims, we examine recent research on moral judgment, moral identity, and moral emotions.     

Is Lying Bound to Commitment? Empirically Investigating Deceptive Presuppositions,Implicatures, and Actions

Lying is an important moral phenomenon that most people are affected by on a daily basis—be it in personal relationships, in political debates, or in the form of fake news. Nevertheless, surprisingly little is known about what actually constitutes a lie. According to the traditional definition of lying, a person lies if they explicitly express something they believe to be false. Consequently, it is often assumed that people cannot lie by more indirectly communicating believed-false claims, for instance by merely conversationally implicating them. In this paper, we subject this claim to an empirical test. In a preregistered study of 300 participants, we investigate how people judge cases of implicit deceptions that would usually be excluded by the traditional definition of lying (i.e., conversational implicatures, presuppositions, and nonverbal actions). Our results show that people do in fact consider it possible to lie by indirect means, suggesting that people have a broader concept of lying than is usually assumed. Moreover, our findings indicate that lie judgments are closely tied to the extent to which agents are perceived as having committed themselves to the believed-false claims they have communicated. We discuss the implications of our results for the traditional definition of lying and propose a new commitment-based definition of lying that can account for the findings of our experiment.     

Religiosity enhances emotion and deontological choice in moral dilemmas

While early psychological theories debated the relation between religiosity and moral decision making, more recent work approached this relation on empirical grounds using multidimensional measures of religiosity and moral dilemmas. The present study investigated the influence of individual differences in religious thoughts and feelings, social desirability and mood on emotions and decisions in moral dilemmas that pit social welfare against harming another person. In order to increase emotional salience, moral dilemmas were framed as personal choices. Results indicated that the tendency to seek religious guidance in everyday life, and social desirability positively predicted deontological choices (i.e., refusing to harm one person in order to save several people). In addition, individual differences in religious feelings positively predicted negative emotion presence in these moral dilemmas. These results highlight the motivational and emotional dimensions of religiosity that influence moral choice and emotional experience in moral dilemmas.     

The Ethical Perspective: An Identity Theory of the Psychological Influences on Moral Choice

The 2008 Presidential Address presents the theory of ethical perspective, an identity theory of moral psychology designed to detect the psychological influences on moral choice. Part 1 treats findings on altruism and genocide as an analytical lens through which we can gain insight into political and moral behavior. Part 2 describes moral psychology as a field, presenting a new and broader conceptualization for the discipline. Part 3 outlines an identity theory of moral choice that focuses on the critical role of the ethical perspective, to suggest how an empirically based theory of moral choice looks in practice. Part 4 concentrates on the basic assumptions underlying the theory of ethical perspective. It presents empirical evidence that supports this theoretical framework, from fields as diverse as neuroscience and primatology to child development and linguistics, thus demonstrating political psychology's important links to other disciplines. In addition to presenting a new theory of moral psychology, designed to fill an important gap in the literature on ethics and moral choice, the Address treats studies of altruism and genocide as an illustration of research that reveals broader insight into the nature of political psychology as a discipline.     

Time and moral judgment

Do moral judgments hinge on the time available to render them? According to a recent dual-process model of moral judgment, moral dilemmas that engage emotional processes are likely to result in fast deontological gut reactions. In contrast, consequentialist responses that tot up lives saved and lost in response to such dilemmas would require cognitive control to override the initial response. Cognitive control, however, takes time. In two experiments, we manipulated the time available to arrive at moral judgments in two ways: by allotting a fixed short or large amount of time, and by nudging people to answer swiftly or to deliberate thoroughly. We found that faster responses indeed lead to more deontological responses among those moral dilemmas in which the killing of one to save many necessitates manhandling an innocent person and in which this action is depicted as a means to an end. Thus, our results are the first demonstration that inhibiting cognitive control through manipulations of time alters moral judgments.     

Identity, Reasoning, and Emotion: An Empirical Comparison of Three Sources of Moral Motivation

Prior research on moral motivation has primarily emphasized moral reasoning and moral emotion; however, identity may also play an important role. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to examine the relative importance of prosocial identity, prosocial moral reasoning, and empathy in predicting prosocial behavior. The sample included 91 university students, ages 19–35 years (M=21.89; SD=3.01; 80% European American; 65% female). Prosocial identity and empathy, but not prosocial moral reasoning, were positively associated with overall prosocial behavior. Exploratory analyses examined how these three sources of prosocial motivation differentially related to six forms of prosocial behavior. Results suggest the importance of considering the roles of all three sources of moral motivation.