Abstract:

When individuals or their ingroup members engage in immoral behaviors, they will face a situation of moral dissonance, for immoral behavior damaging people’s moral self-image and making people experience negative moral emotions, such as guilt and shame. To maintain a positive self-image, people are motivated to reduce moral dissonance via a series of moral self-regulatory strategies before and after their engaging in immoral behaviors. In the moral decision stage before one committing an immoral behavior, moral dissonance resulting from the anticipated threat to the moral self may be lessened through moral licensing. In one way, individuals may have obtained enough moral credits from past moral behaviors like bank credits in real life, with which the threat to moral self from the coming immoral behavior was thus offset (moral credits model). In a second way, individuals may have already established a credential of their morality in the past, to which extent the subsequent immoral behavior would not be deemed to an immoral thing (moral credentials model). After engaging in an immoral behavior, in the behavior evaluation stage and the responsibility attribution stage, two possible self-regulatory strategies might be used. On the one hand, motivated forgetting of moral rules as a motivational self-regulatory strategy helps people avoid awareness of moral significance of immoral behavior. Without moral awareness, individuals refrain from involving in a moral evaluation and thus a moral dissonance. On the other hand, other cognitive strategies including moral shifting, and amoralization and moral disengagement may help people rationalize their immoral behaviors. Specifically, individuals may shift the moral evaluation from one foundation to another, on which an immoral event would have an acceptable interpretation and thus the actor become pardonable. Also in a similar way, individuals may shift the standards of their salient moral foundation without changing it, and the norm-violating behavior uncritical with a least cost. Moreover, individuals may also shift the moral evaluation from a moral foundation to an amoral foundation, which leading to morality unrelated to and uninvolved in the subsequent evaluation. Furthermore, individuals may also engage in moral compensation or moral cleansing. Individuals seek some moral or prosocial behaviors to reaffirm their moral self-images and thus to resolve the potential moral dissonance. Since there exist an metaphor between bodily purity and moral purity, individuals may be involved in some abstract behaviors to the feeling of immorality, such as having a bath, brushing teeth, and washing hands, etc. While in a different and particular way, Chinese people may prefer to a psychological self-defense mechanism as a solution to moral dissonance. In particular, Chinese individuals are inclined to covering behaviors to conceal their moral qualms and to avoid losing faces the public. The flexibility and the long-term negative effect of these moral self-regulatory strategies, especially which how small mistakes pave the way for large future immoral behaviors, were discussed. And future research directions, such as cross-cultural differences of these moral self-regulatory strategies, the role of ingroup characteristics played in these self-regulatory processes, and new researching methods to moral self-regulatory processes, were also discussed.