Moral Self-regulation:Compensatory Or Consistent?

Moral self-regulation is individual does or does not engage moral behavior(immoral behavior),according to the moral self. In recent years,there are some inconsistent results in previous studies which focused on moral self-regulation.We believe that the reason may is previous researchers just based on one aspect and have no clear distinction between the moral identity and moral self-perception. Our study based on the two aspects of moral self,which are moral identity(trait moral self) and moral self-perception(temporary moral self) to investigate moral self-regulation.Our study consists of 2 experiments. In experiment 1, Participants were asked to copy the moral vocabulary,must dscribed it and link it with themselves, to prime individual’s different levels of moral identity.Then, investigate their behavior intention in the situations which are prosocial or violations, The results show that compared to low level of moral identity, individuals which have high level of moral identity are more inclined to engage in prosocial behavior and more reluctant to engage in violations behavior. In experiment 2, through behavioral memory priming paradigm, to prime individual’s different levels of moral self-perception, and investigate their behavior intention of prosocial or violations. Results indicate that compared to low level of moral self-perception,individuals which have high level of moral self-perception are more inclined to engage in violations behavior rather than prosocial behavior.Finally, this study draws the conclusions as following:(1) There are two ways of moral self regulation, which are moral compensatory and moral consistent.When priming individual’s moral identity, moral self-regulation were consistent; When priming individual’s moral self-perception, moral self-regulation were compensatory.(2) The two ways of moral self regulation not only suitable for prescriptive morality and suitable for proscriptive morality.