The Effects Of Moral Self-regulations On Collective Action And Collective Behavior

There are two main aspects of moral self-regulation, the moral licensing effect,which allows people to restrict moral behavior and may be licensed to refrain from“good” to “bad” when they feel a surplus of moral credits; the other is moral cleansingeffect, which works in the opposite way of moral licensing effect. That is when peopleget a negative influence on perceptions of self-worth, they will engage in moralbehaviors or prosocial actions. Through the moral self-regulation system, people canbalance their perceptions of morality stably. The differences between collective actionand collective behavior are mainly about logic and rationality. Wright, Taylor andMoghaddamthe defined collective action as socially sanctioned actions intended toenhance in-group status, such as political lobbying or voting; the collective behaviorswere named to improve the status of one’s in-group and go against the understoodsocietal rules, such as illegal protests, civil disobedience and so forth.The current study introduced moral self-regulation into the field of collectiveaction and behavior. We randomly recruited170students of Jilin University toparticipate in the experiment. The tools we used are as followed: the experimentalparadigms (Sachdeva, et al,2009); moral identity scale (Aquino&Reed,2007);questionnaires of collective action and behavior. As for the data analysis, spss16.0was used to evaluate participants’ intentions or behaviors under the three conditions-licensing, cleansing and controlling conditions. Findings indicated that1) the primingmaterials could regulate participants’ perceptions of their morality, with positivewords of characteristics having moral identity improved and negative words ofcharacteristics having it down;2) the moral self-regulation system influence people’sintentions and actions, that is, in the moral licensing effect group, participants favoredcollective behaviors; in moral cleansing effect group, participants were more willing to participant in the collective actions.