Effect Of Money Priming And Moral Identity On Moral Hypocrisy

Moral hypocrisy occurs when people fail to practice what they preach,and when people judge others more severely than they judge themselves.According to the person-environment transactional model,we proposed that individuals’ moral hypocrisy was influence by the interaction of personality and situational factors.On the one hand,moral hypocrites try to leave a positive moral image to others,so they declare that they are moral;on the other hand,they want to maintain a good self-concept.Morality is the core of individual’s self-concept.Therefore,we think that money clues from environment and individual’s moral identity are two important variables affecting moral hypocrisy.Studies have shown that moral identity can reduce the occurrence of immoral behavior,and the concept of money can promote unethical behavior.Although moral hypocrisy cannot be equated with immoral behavior,people do immoral acts or appear moral hypocrisy in the end for their own benefit,so we speculated that moral identity and money concept priming also influence moral hypocrisy.Four studies were designed to investigate the influence of money priming and moral identity on moral hypocrisy.Experiment 1 explored how money concept priming and moral identity affect intrapersonal moral hypocrisy,namely,“saying one thing and doing another.” Experiment 3 investigated interpersonal moral hypocrisy,namely,people imposing strict moral standards on other people but practicing less strict moral behavior themselves.Experiment 2 and Experiment 4 explored the influence of money abundance and moral identity on two forms of moral hypocrisy.In Experiment 1,we instructed participants to complete a descrambling task,which activated money concepts or neutral concepts.In addition,participants in the money condition were asked to see two money pictures,while in the neutral condition participants saw a fish swimming picture and a flower picture.The task assignment paradigm was adopted to measure the degree of moral hypocrisy in experiment 1 and experiment 2.The people who chose to toss a coin but gave themselves positive taskswas the moral hypocrities.In experiment 2 and experiment 4,money abundance and money deficiency was manipulated by growing up story and money pictures.Participants in the high-money condition read about growing up having abundant financial resources and saw two pictures with abundance of money,whereas low money participants read about growing up having meager resources and saw two pictures with broken money.In experiment 3 and experiment 4,the double standards paradigm was used to measure the degree of moral hypocrisy,in which,participants responded to moral dilemmas and were asked how acceptable it would be if others engaged in the described behavior,or alternatively,if they themselves engaged in the described behavior.The results showed that:(1)Compared with the priming of neutral concept and money scarcity,money concept priming and affluent money priming increased the moral hypocrisy of inconsistent words and deeds for participants with low moral identity,and that this pattern was weaker for individuals with high moral identity.(2)For participants with low moral identity,the priming of money concept and affluent money increased their moral hypocrisy of double moral judgment criteria,but the effect was not significant for the participants with high moral identity.(3)People whose moral identity is highly with the neutral priming or in the low-money condition reversed moral hypocrisy at the interpersonal level,namely,“hypercrisy”.