The Effect Of Shame On Deception

Shame has two influences on individuals, including adaptability and pathology. On the one hand, shame can affect the generation and development of certain psychological pathological symptoms; on the other hand, shame also affects individual motivation experience and control individual behaviors. Most existing researches pay attention to the pathological function of shame; however, Chinese traditional culture attaches importance to the function of ―sense of shame‖ and emphasizes that the shame will generate when individuals behaving by violating social rule or internalized moral code, which promotes individuals to reflect on their current behaviors so as to drive positive acts, and prevent or change misconducts. Therefore, under the background of Chinese culture and by taking deceit as the specific wrongdoing, this article discussed about whether shame would constrain the wrongdoing.By adopting spot detecting method, the research 1 surveyed that whether the shame would effect individual cognitive processing of deception information. The result showed that:(1) The interactive effect among main effect of vocabulary type, experiment group and vocabulary type; specifically, the difference was obvious in emotion elicitation group; examinees’ reaction time to deception vocabulary and faith vocabulary was longer than unrelated vocabulary; however, there was no obvious difference in control group;(2) In the aspect of attentional bias, the experimental group showed obvious attentional avoid to deception vocabulary and faith vocabulary while control group expressed attentional pointing to faith vocabulary and attentional avoid to deception vocabulary.Through two deception stories of benefiting oneself without harming others and harming others to benefit oneself, the research 2 discussed about the influence of shame on individual acceptance level to deception behavior, and on deception behavior tendency. The result showed that:(1) As for the acceptance level of deception behavior, compared with control conditions, under the experimental group, participants’ judgment of benefiting oneself without harming others was loose while there was no difference of harming others to benefit oneself.(2) In the aspect of behavior tendency, compared with control conditions, under the experimental group, participants’ tendency to the deception behavior of benefiting oneself without harming others was higher while there was no difference of the tendency to harm others to benefit oneself.Research 3 surveyed the influence of shame on individual deception behavior. Under the condition of having the same deception chance as well as motivation, compared with control group, the participants in experimental group could constrain their immoral behaviors better with performing less deception behavior.The research result indicated that, in shame, individuals might adopt approaching or avoiding behavior to protect the image of moral self; however, individual perception of whether they could redeem words and deeds failure would generate important influence on adopting approaching or avoiding behavior. When individuals believed that they had chance to redeem the moral failure caused by them, they would adopt approaching behavior to compensate; otherwise, they would adopt avoiding withdrawal behavior so as to prevent them from suffering from greater harm.