“道德自我调整的悖论”
6月29日，美国西北大学网站报道，西北大学心理学教授S.萨奇德瓦（Sonya Szchdeva）和D.梅丁（Douglas Medin）联合发表在《心理学》杂志上的论文《犯罪的圣人和圣洁的罪人；道德自我调整的悖论》表明，个人道德清洗与对道德自我的理想水平恢复有关，它还首次表明富有激情的人，更有可能通过采取一种反常行为或放弃德行来调整自身的言行。这一研究结果是基于三个实验调查，以研究道德行为如何受内在自我调整的影响，共46人接受了西北大学笔迹测试中心的笔迹测试，并被要求捐赠10美元给参与者所选择的慈善机构，以进行行为观察。
The Paradox of Moral Self-Regulation
SciMed - Neuroscience
TS-SI NEWS SERVICE
SUNDAY, 28 JUNE 2009 03:00
Evanston, IL, USA.Whether they be high-flying politicians or ordininary citizens of good reputation, there can be a fall from grace. Sometimes moral actions lead to bad, making no sense at all.
A study observes that extremes of good and bad behavior can occur in the same person. Someone with ample moral self-worth in one aspect of their lives can slip into immorality or opposite behavior in other areas. Their abundant self-esteem can somehow push them to balance out all that goodness. Conversely, the study shows, people who engage in immoral behavior make amends and cleanse themselves with good works.
Other studies have shown the moral-cleansing effect, but this new model shows that the cleansing also has to do with restoring an ideal level of moral self-worth. In other words, when people operate above or below a certain level of moral self-worth, they instinctively push back in the opposite direction to reach an internally regulated set point of goodness.
"If people feel too moral," Sachdeva said, "they might not have sufficient incentive to engage in moral action because of the costliness of being good."
Think, for example, of that sugar- and fat-laden concoction that you wolf down after an especially vigorous run, said Douglas Medin, professor of psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences atNorthwestern University. "That pretty much eliminates the benefits of running an extra 20 minutes," he said.
Northwestern's Sonya Sachdeva, Rumen Iliev and Medin are co-authors of the new paper that appearsd inPsychological Science. "Sonya and Rumen may have even more intriguing results in the future," said Medin, the study's senior researcher, "because they are examining whether the results generalize to different cultures."
An abundance of research shows that people are motivated both by the warm glow that results from good behavior and recognition of costly, long-term consequences of immoral behavior on kin and society at large.
But the Northwestern study for the first time shows that perhaps people whose glow is much warmer than average are more likely to regulate behavior by acting in an opposite manner or passing up opportunities to behave morally.
"Imagine a line on a plane," Sachdeva said. "If you go above the line, you feel pressure to come back down. The only way you can come back down is either by refraining from good social behavior or by actively engaging in immoral behavior."
Based on three experiments, the study of how moral behavior is affected by internal self-regulation included 46 participants. For each experiment, participants were told that they were engaging in a handwriting test at Northwestern's Center for Handwriting Analysis. They also were asked if they would like to donate up to $10 to a charity of their choice.
All experiments included a positive-traits and a negative-traits condition. In the positive-traits condition, participants copied words such as kind, caring, generous and honest. In the negative condition, they wrote down words such as selfish, dishonest and cruel. They were asked to think carefully about what each word meant to them before writing a self-relevant story involving the words.
To provide a control condition, experiment one also included a neutral condition, providing words such as book, car and house.
- Inexperiment one, participants who wrote a story referring to positive traits donated one-fifth as much money to a charity as those in the negative condition. Conversely, those whose stories encompassed negative traits acted more altruistically. In summary, they gave about $5 in the negative-traits condition, about $3 in the control condition and about $1 in the positive-traits condition.
- In the only change inexperiment two, participants were randomly assigned to use the words to write specifically about either themselves or someone close to them. (A fourth wrote positive stories about themselves; a fourth positive stories about others; a fourth negative stories about themselves; and a fourth negative stories about others.)
The researchers assumed correctly that changes in self-concept would occur when study subjects took a first-person, rather than a third-person, perspective. The moral-cleansing and moral-licensing effects occurred only when people were talking about themselves.
In the positive condition, those who wrote about themselves donated the least, while those who wrote about others showed opposite behavior. In contrast, those in the negative condition who wrote about themselves gave more than those who told an unflattering story about others. - Thethird experimentlooked at environmental-related behaviors and included neutral, positive-traits and negative-traits conditions. Participants assumed roles of managers of manufacturing plants and had to make a decision about putting costly filters on their smokestacks.
All the managers in their field, they were told, had gotten together and decided to run the filters 60 percent of the time. So costs were higher for anyone who decided to run the filters more than 60 percent of the time.
People in the neutral condition ran their filters 60 to 65 percent of the time; those in the negative condition ran them 73 percent of the time; and those in the positive condition ran them 55 percent of the time.
The research draws on previous research on moral regulation. People who selected themselves as nonsexist in one study, for example, tended to choose a man for a job over a woman who was a little less qualified. "In that case, when they affirmed to themselves that they were nonsexist, they were more likely to attribute their decisions to external causes rather than to sexism."
The Northwestern researchers stress cross-cultural differences in their model, suspecting, for example, if they ran tests in India, where people's actions are more interdependent, the results would be different.
CitationSinning saints and saintly sinners: the paradox of moral self-regulation.Sonya Sachdeva, Rumen Iliev and Douglas Medin.Psychological Science2009; 20(4): 523-528. Epub. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02326.xAbstract
The question of why people are motivated to act altruistically has been an important one for centuries, and across various disciplines. Drawing on previous research on moral regulation, we propose a framework suggesting that moral (or immoral) behavior can result from an internal balancing of moral self-worth and the cost inherent in altruistic behavior. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to write a self-relevant story containing words referring to either positive or negative traits. Participants who wrote a story referring to the positive traits donated one fifth as much as those who wrote a story referring to the negative traits. In Experiment 2, we showed that this effect was due specifically to a change in the self-concept. In Experiment 3, we replicated these findings and extended them to cooperative behavior in environmental decision making. We suggest that affirming a moral identity leads people to feel licensed to act immorally. However, when moral identity is threatened, moral behavior is a means to regain some lost self-worth.www.psychspace.com心理学空间网
