A Study On The Relationship Between College Students' Narcissism And Moral Decision

Narcissism, first considered as a kind of clinical symptoms, performance for the need of attention, sense of entitlement, lack of sympathy,and exaggerated behavior pattern. After the 1980s, a growing number of researchers believe that narcissism is a common tendency of personality,which is continuous and multidimensional. Moral decision-making,including intuitive decisions and utilitarian decision,refers to a person’s moral reaction, evaluation or judgment for certain behavior in real or hypothetical situation, intuitive decision rely on emotional factors,while utilitarian decision depends on the cognitive resources. So far,the research between narcissism and decision making mainly focus in the field of investment,management and gambling, etc.,,and have shown a significant tendency of risk-seeking in narcissists,while the influence of narcissism in moral decision-making is seldom mentioned. This study aim to exploring the relationship between narcissism and Moral decision-making by three experiments. In the first Experiment, participants were asked to complete the NPI questionnaire and 8 situational stories in which you have to make a moral decision.in order to study the emotional-cognitive mechanism of narcissists in moral decision-making,the second experiment used different time setting to control participants’time of thinking. Finally, we added a social evaluation variable to investigate the influence factors when narcissists make moral decisions.The results showed that: (1) High narcissists are more like to make utilitarian moral decisions than low narcissists in both kinds of moral situations. (2) High narcissists are more inclined to make utilitarian moral decisions under the time pressure, while low narcissists are more inclined to make intuitive moral decisions. (3) There is no significant difference between the two kinds of time setting for high narcissist when they make moral decisions, but their tendency of utilitarianism is decreasing. Nevertheless,Low narcissists showed marginally significant difference between the two kinds of time conditions,they tend to be more utilitarian with extended thinking time. (4) Compared with low narcissists,high narcissists are more like to make utilitarian moral decisions under good social evaluation. (5) There shows a significant difference for high narcissists when they make moral decisions under different social evaluation.they would like to be more utilitarian by giving good social evaluation,while more deontological by giving bad evaluation. whereas there is no significant difference for low narcissists...