Research On The Dynamic Moral Self-Regard And Moral Compensation

Foreign researchers are increasingly focusing on moral self-regard in the past two decades. Moral self-regard refers to the degree that one cares about his morality, and the percentage it takes in self-worth. Monin (2001) showed the dynamic nature of moral self-regard, and he affirmed that one’s self regard based on recent past behavior affected future morally relevant actions. When people are made secured about their morality, they would sometimes act less morally later on; people sometimes boosted their moral self-regard to compensate for the failure in other domains. We launched three parallel studies to further validate the dynamic nature of the moral self-regard and some possible influencing factors.Study1confirmed that the dynamic moral self-regard did exist among Chinese participants. We found that people liked to remain a reasonable level of moral self-regard, but not to attain moral perfection. They sometimes could afford to engage in morally problematic behaviors if they had already done their good deed.Study2contained two sub-experiments, to verify the phenomenon of moral compensation from the perspective of experiments of with-in participants and between participants respectively. We found that feeling moral could serve people to compensate the failure for the adequacy in other non-moral domains. When a person found that his/her choice might not be as expedient as that could have been, they might justify what they did by attributing it to their greater morality, and put down others as less moral at the meantime. Intimate relationship of the two people moderated the relationship between the non-moral self-threat and moral self-regard. The importance of moral self-regard partially mediated this relationship between the non-moral self-threat and moral self-regard. Study3confirmed the compensation of dynamic moral self-regard from the opposite side using the paradigm that foreign researchers first exerted. When the non-moral and moral self-concept was challenged at the same time, participants were going to give the group-mate a bad evaluation, and did not want to be friends with them.