Threats to Moral Identity: Testing the Effects of Incentives and Consequences of One's Actions on Moral Cleansing

Individuals engage in moral cleansing, a compensatory process to reaffirm one's moral identity, when one's moral self-concept is threatened. However, too much moral cleansing can license individuals to engage in future unethical acts. This study examined the effects of incentives and consequences of one's actions on cheating behavior and moral cleansing. Results found that incentives and consequences interacted such that unethical thoughts were especially threatening, resulting in more moral cleansing, when large incentives to cheat were present and cheating explicitly harmed others. Implications are discussed in terms of ethics training, using incentives as motivators, and the depersonalized norms of science.     

The Impact of Leadership Style on Moral Identity and Subsequent In-Role Performance: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

This study investigated the impact of supervisors’ servant leadership (i.e., leadership that starts with a leader who wants to serve) on supervisees’ moral identity and subsequent in-role performance. Data from 226 supervisor–supervisee dyads were collected from several domestic and multinational companies operating in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Confirmatory factor analysis was conducted to confirm the factorial validity of the measures that were employed in this study. The hypothesized moderated mediation model was tested using hierarchical multiple regression analysis. Based on social learning theory, the results showed that supervisees’ moral identity served as the psychological mediating mechanism through which supervisors’ servant leadership led to supervisees’ increased in-role performance. Furthermore, the results also supported supervisees’ avoidance orientation as the dispositional boundary condition of this mediating effect. This study contributes to both the servant leadership and moral identity literatures by addressing questions with useful theoretical and managerial implications.     

Coping with Age‐related Threats to Role Identity: Older Couples and the Management of Household Money

As more couples live together into old age, difficult decisions have to be made about money matters, including the financing of late‐life care. This paper analyses in‐depth qualitative data from six older heterosexual couples, part of a wider study concerning money management in later life. Research when these cohorts were younger found that the organisation of money management within households was specialised and highly gendered, leading to substantive imbalances of power and access to financial resources, while also being core to the formation and maintenance of gendered role identities and couple identities. We find in this study that if a partner's ability to fulfil a money management role identity is threatened by later‐life issues such as poor health and cognitive decline, the other partner may try to protect that aspect of the spouse's role identity, using various covert strategies. This might be done to shore up the spouse's self‐esteem in the face of such age‐related threats to role identity, to ‘keep up appearances’ to the outside world or to maintain their identity as a couple at a time of life when there may be multiple difficulties to deal with. These findings have implications for practice and policy in the realm of money and identity management in later life. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Social Networking Sites: Mediating the Self and its Communities

What do social networking sites reveal about the relation between the self and the community? We conceptualise social networking sites as technologies of the self and the community enabling individuals to self‐present and also objectifying the community's evaluation of individuals (through ‘structures of recognition’ such as page views, friends and lovehearts). We analyse the way in which 37 Scottish adolescents used the social networking site Bebo in nonprescribed and creative ways. First, they challenged the single authorship of profiles by co‐creating multi‐authored profiles. Second, they used creative language to obscure meaning from the preying eyes of parents, teachers and potential employers. We conclude by discussing the simplistic assumptions that Bebo makes about the relation between the self and the community. In contrast, newer social networking sites such as Facebook and Google+ are increasingly enabling people to present different facets of themselves to different communities. How people use social networking sites, and how these sites are developing to attract more users, reveals how the multiplicity of human identity is related to the multiple communities that people participate in. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Meta‐stereotypes,Social Image and Help Seeking: Dependency‐Related Meta‐stereotypes Reduce Help‐Seeking Behaviour

People who need help can be reluctant to seek it. This can be due to social image concerns. Here, we investigate if these concerns may be prompted by a salient negative meta‐stereotype: the belief that one's group is judged negatively by another group. Specifically, we researched group members' help‐seeking behaviour in the context of a dependency‐related meta‐stereotype. In a two‐condition study (N = 45), we manipulated participants' belief that their national group was judged dependent by a significant out‐group. We then examined their subsequent help‐seeking behaviour on a real‐world task. Participants whose social identity as a group member was salient showed greater reluctance to seek help when the meta‐stereotype was made prominent compared with when it was not. This suggests that, in a context where social image and social identity concerns are relevant, group members are willing to sacrifice the possibility of accessing needed help in order to avoid confirming a negative stereotype of their group. The implications of these results for helping transactions and community development are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Categories We Share’: Mobilising Common In‐groups in Discourse on Contemporary Immigration in Greece

Prejudice reduction has been an important concern within social psychology both in theory and applied research. According to the premises of Social Identity Theory, redrawing of the category boundaries is often considered a necessary step in order to battle prejudice, because in‐group favouritism when the category boundaries change is diffused to the previously distinct identities. The present paper offers a review of the relevant research, and following a discourse analytic perspective argues that recategorisation can also be viewed as a rhetorical resource that people use in verbal interaction in order to achieve certain rhetorical ends. This point is exemplified using interview data from Greece with Greek participants who mobilise common in‐groups between themselves and the immigrants in Greece. Different common in‐groups were mobilised on the basis of common human nature, common ethnic descent and through the use of the common experience of migration that many Greek people have because Greece has been an emigrant sending country for the biggest part of the 20th century. Occasionally, these category constructions were used to differentiate between immigrants of different ethnic descent claiming that only certain immigrant groups can integrate to Greek society, whereas on other instances, these common in‐groups were used in order to inoculate speakers of accusations of prejudice. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sense of identity in advanced Alzheimer’s dementia: A cognitive dissociation between sameness and selfhood?

We looked at whether sense of identity persists in patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and if its profile remains the same between two examinations. A specifically designed protocol was administered to 16 AD patients in the mild to severe stages of dementia and to 16 matched healthy controls, both living in the same institution. We showed that sense of identity was broadly preserved in AD patients. The patterns of their responses were similar to those of controls, and remained consistent over a two-week period. However, some qualitative characteristics of sense of identity in AD patients differed significantly from those of controls, suggesting that AD patients may not be able to update their self-knowledge, probably because of their episodic memory deficit. These results are discussed in the light of both current models of the self and philosophical concepts such as sameness and selfhood.     

How to endure presentism

Presentism and endurantism are natural bedfellows: arguments have been mounted from endurantism to presentism and vice versa. I generalise an argument against the compatibility between presentism and endurantism offered recently by Tallant (forthcoming. “Presentism, Persistence and Trans-temporal Dependence.” Philosophical Studies). I then show how to reformulate endurantism so that it is compatible with presentism. I demonstrate that this reformulated version of endurantism can do the same work with respect to the problem of temporary intrinsics as can standard definitions.