The Influence Of Physical Cleanliness And Moral Identity On The Moral Hypocrisy In College Students

Moral hypocrisy is the phenomenon that when facing a situation,individual expressed a moral attitude about what should do but behaved in another way.This double-standard is due to moral behavior may impair the interests of individual.Previous studies suggested the enhancement of self-regulation and moral identity can suppress moral hypocrisy.Recently,the embodied cognition and conceptual metaphor widened perspective of moral psychology.As a hot-debated theory in current moral psychology,cleanliness metaphor focused on how the physical cleanliness enhances the self-regulation.To study the morality in the framework of embodied cognition,explore how physical cleanliness and moral identity affect moral hypocrisy,deepen our understanding of morality.We conducted three experiments in this research: Experiment 1 combines task assignment paradigm and morality judgment to explore the relationship among physical cleanliness,attitude-behave inconsistent,self-other inconsistent and moral hypocrisy.Experiment 2 further explored how different level of moral identity affects moral hypocrisy and efficiency of physical cleanliness based on the result of experiment 1.In experiment 3,we focused on the group of low moral identity,explored the relationship among physical cleanliness,guilt and moral hypocrisy.The results showed(1)physical cleanliness didn’t induce moral hypocrisy,and control group expressed more moral hypocrisy.Physical cleanliness didn’t induce double-standard during morality judgments,the non-cleanliness group showed a loosen standard for themselves.Physical cleanliness suppressed moral hypocrisy.(2)During task assignment,low moral identity group showed moral hypocrisy,but high moral identity group expressed behavior correspond one’s attitude.Similarly,during morality judgment,low moral identity group expressed amplified double-standard,and showed a loosen standard for themselves.But the high moral identity group still expressed less moral hypocrisy as before.(3)We didn’t find the interaction between moral identity and physical cleanliness.The low moral identity group expressed less moral hypocrisy and double-standard,but physical cleanliness didn’t affect moral hypocrisy of high moral identity group.(4)Guilt impacted moral hypocrisy in a complex pattern.Generally,guilt suppressed moral hypocrisy and double-standard.Within low moral identity group,physical cleanliness and guilt affect moral hypocrisy in an interactive way.But within the high moral identity group,both physical cleanliness and guilt suppress moral hypocrisy.