Moral Memory Bias In Advice Giving By Different Types Of Adviser

When the interests of advisers and decision-makers conflict,some advisers will give favorable suggestions to themselves.But such selfish advice may threaten their moral self.In response to this moral self-threat,advisers may exhibit moral memory bias,specifically forgetting or remembering less of their own selfish advice.Through three studies,this study explores whether self-interested advisers experience moral self-threat and show moral memory bias in conflict of interest scenarios,and explores the possible influence of prosocial cost on them.In the experiment,participants were asked to play the role of adviser and give advice,then complete moral self-evaluation,then complete distraction tasks,and finally recall their own advice.In study 1,four numerical matrices of different prosocial costs were used to explore whether self-interested advisers would exhibit moral self-threat and moral memory bias.On the basis of study 1,study 2 selected the scenario with low prosocial cost and study 3 selected the scenario with high prosocial cost to further explore the moral self-threat and moral memory bias of self-interested advisers.The results showed that:(1)Compared with altruistic advisers,self-interested advisers experience moral self-threat,that is,they have lower moral self-evaluation of themselves.(2)In different prosocial cost scenarios,self-interested advisers show moral memory bias,that is,they exaggerate the number of altruistic suggestions they give when recalling.(3)When the prosocial cost was low,altruistic advisers showed no moral memory bias.However,when the prosocial cost was high,the altruistic advisers showed the opposite phenomenon of moral memory bias,that is,they remembered their altruistic suggestions less when recalling them.This study shows that in the situation of advice giving with conflict of interest,self-interested advisers will show moral memory bias,that is,they will exaggerate their altruistic behavior.This study suggests that altruistic advisers behave differently under different prosocial costs,which may be due to concerns about reputation.In this study,moral self-threat and moral memory bias were studied,and the situation of advice giving with conflict of interest was introduced,which enriched the applicable situation of these studies,and had some implications for understanding and even intervening in people’s advice giving.