Implicit Assessment Of Moral Self-Evaluation In Shame-Proneness

Moral self is the awareness of one’s own moral status. Moral self is a very important part of self-awareness. There are few studies have discussed about moral self separately, and it was always discussed as self-awareness or self concept. Monin & Jordan (2008) considered that the situation would affect the moral self. They found that the experimenters would change the state of moral self, and affect the subsequent moral judgment and moral behavior to a certain extent, when they recalled the past ethical or unethical behavior. Bandura (1991,2001) argued that self-evaluation was a key point in moral motivation, and anticipating or committing personal transgressions would lead to affective reactions (guilt and shame) that motivated moral behaviors. These affective reactions have been termed as self-conscious moral emotions because they reflect self-evaluation (Tangney et al., 2007). These researches did not focus on the differences of moral self in automatic processing and deep processing. Tobia and Anna (2013) introduced an implicit measure for assessment in negative self-evaluation in advance and provided empirical evidences that the IAT could be used to assess not only trait but also state in moral self-evaluation. Marco and Luigi (2009) found that when individuals made a response to the moral aggression, the negative self-evaluation which measured by implicit measure was mediated by the sense of shame. Our research will discuss how moral self change when the participants imagine theirs and mother’s shameful things through implicit assessment of moral self-evaluation in shame-proneness with the Chinese individuals.In this research, we used the implicit association task and the Go/No-Go Association task of moral self-evaluation in order to investigate automatic reactions after personal norm transgressions in three experimental studies. Specifically, our research were designed to provide further support to the situation that shame-proneness involves a negative evaluation of moral self.In study 1, negative self-evaluation of participants who had been blamed for being late to the experiment was higher in contrast with the control condition. In study 2, we used 2 (group of me or mother)×2 (Imagination of Transgression:yes vs. no) experimental design. Participants imagined committing either (a) a moral transgression or (b) no moral wrongdoing. We found that in the moral transgression condition, negative self-evaluation was increased in contrast with the control condition. This effect was obviously pronounced among participants who were high in dispositional shame-proneness in particularly. Moreover, in the moral transgression condition, we found that the shame-proncness was mediated by negative moral self-evaluation. The similar results were found when the experimenters imaged theirs mother was doing the ashamed thing or not. In study 3, we also used 2 (group of me or mother)×2 (Imagination of Transgression:yes vs. no) experimental design by the GNAT paradigm. The results of study 2 were confirmed further by study 3. As the same time, we found that under no matter what conditions, there was no influence on either the explicit self-esteem or the implicit esteem.The final conclusions as follows:first, negative moral self-evaluation which was considered as a reaction to a personal moral transgression could be assessed using an implicit measure. Second, individuals in shame-prone would particularly pronounced more negative moral self-evaluation comparing with those individuals in less shame-prone. It means that shame promotes emotion-and avoidance-oriented coping strategies those are aimed at restoring a positive self-view and protecting the self from harm. Third, compared with individuals in no shame-prone, individuals in shame-prone could pronounce negative moral self-evaluation particularly when they were imaging that their mother was doing the ashamed thing or not. The present findings were helpful to have a deep understanding of the processes of cognition and affection that underlie moral motivation.