Abstract: Intentional unethical behavior is characterized of breaking the daily standards and deviating from the moral compass consciously, which is currently widespread in the public fields and private spaces and give rise to immense economical price and social cost. In this paper, we draw a process model of generating intentional unethical behavior from the perspective of self-concept maintenance theory and moral dissonance theory, which depicted the inducing factors and potential pre-violation and post-violation psychological mechanism. In psychology, behavioral ethics, management, as well as cognitive neuroscience field, loads of researchers have explored factors that would lead individuals to violate social norms consciously, conducting intentional unethical behavior, in specific culture and social contexts. This paper reviewed the influence of both individual factors and context factors on intentional unethical behavior respectively. Individual factor referred to characteristics or attributes possessed by people, including cognitive factors, personality factors, physical factors and unconscious factors. Context factor meant the external features people perceived in the process of perception of the outer world, including surrounding settings, warning cues, time cues and interpersonal interaction. What’s more, previous papers showed that most of individual factors, in essence, drove people to behave unethically because of improving motivation of gaining self-interest and impairing or exploiting self-control resources, during which context factors would buffer or enhance the effect. But how did these factors exert impact on people’s intentional unethical behavior? Two competing motivations, that is the motivation of maintaining moral self-concept and of grabbing the external interest, of human played a vital role. When facing temptations which would give us practical benefits by unethical behaviors or violations, in fact, people firstly perceived threats to moral self-concept. The motivation of maintaining the positive image of “I am a good person” would be reinforced and then pre-violation self-justification strategies (such as tokens preference, self-serving altruism and moral licensing) were expected to be adopted to buffer the inner conflict, which could help individual to find a balance or equilibrium between the two motivating forces. Eventually they would conduct unethical behavior in comfort zone, where they gain some financial benefit from behaving unethically but still maintain their positive self-concept in terms of being moral individuals. That means people would consciously avoid minor unethical behavior which would not take substantial and significant external interests for individual as well as major unethical behavior which would be at the expense of changing positive self-concept. After conducting unethical behavior, moral self-concept would be threatened and thus motivation of maintaining positive self-image would be activated again. In this situation, through specific post-violation self-justification strategies (such as moral cleansing, moral disengagement, motivated forgetting and moral hypocrisy), moral self-concept would eventually be protected and maintained. Future researches are expected to give more emphasis on exploring behavioral and psychological mechanisms, especially understanding and avoiding unethical behavior in the perspective of mental motivation and being aware of unconscious factors and processes. At the same time, longitudinal tracking method and unethical behavior that appeared in the Internet context are supposed to be paid more attention in the future.

Key words: unethical behavior, factors, psychological mechanism, moral self-concept

摘要： 故意不道德行为是指个体在明知行为违背了道德规范，但仍采取的不道德行为。研究表明，故意不道德行为存在众多诱发因素，尤其是道德自我概念具有重要的自我调节作用，在行为发生前后都产生重要影响。本文对故意不道德行为的影响因素进行了梳理，探索其行为发生前后的心理过程，并对既有的研究框架进行了整合。未来可以更关注无意识因素和心理动机因素对不道德行为的影响和作用机制，并尝试探索网络情境中的不道德行为。

关键词: 不道德行为, 影响因素, 心理过程, 道德自我概念