Research On The Effect Of Unconscious Goal Priming And Negative Emotions On Moral Hypocrisy

Moral hypocrisy refers to the inconsistency between individual moral belief and moral behavior,including discrepancies between words and deeds at the individual level,and“being strict with others and lenient with self” at the interpersonal level.Not only does moral hypocrisy hurt the interpersonal relationships,but also could have a detrimental impact on one’s morality.Unconscious goal priming is to stimulate clues to start goals that exist in the individual’s mind,and then the individual will continue to pursue the goal behavior.Both goal priming and goal pursuit occur unconsciously.Individual moral behavior is influenced by the activation of unconscious goals related to morality.At the same time,moral emotion also has a wide influence on moral behavior.Using group sentence test and moral situation judgment scenarios,466 college students were examined through behavioral experiments and SPSS21.0 was used for data analysis.The results showed that:(1)The main effect of unconscious helping goal was significant.Specifically,the control group subjects’ moral standards for other people’s violations were higher than those for themselves,showing interpersonal moral hypocrisy.On the contrary,there was no significant difference in the moral scores of self and other people’s violations in the goal priming group,indicating that the goal priming inhibited moral hypocrisy.(2)Compared to the neutral emotion group,there was no significant difference in the moral evaluation scores of self and others under guilt,which indicated that guilt suppressed moral hypocrisy.(3)Compared to the neutral group,the subjects’ moral score of self in anger was higher than that of others,indicating that anger increased moral hypocrisy.(4)In neutral emotions,there was no moral hypocrisy in the unconscious goal priming group,and the unconscious goal priming inhibited moral hypocrisy;in anger,there was moral hypocrisy in the unconscious goal priming group,indicating that anger inhibited the effect of unconscious goals on moral hypocrisy;In guilt,there was no moral hypocrisy in the unconscious goal priming group.