The Influence Of Moral Cleansing Effect On Interpersonal Attraction

Human beings are social animals, so interpersonal relationships, as a kind ofcomplex social relation, have long been the focus of psychology. Interpersonalattraction as an important part of interpersonal relationship, also has been closelyexamined. Recently, research on interpersonal attraction mainly focused on theinfluence of psychological factors on the interpersonal attractions. Thesepsychologcial factors include interpersonal ability, interpersonal relationship, familyupbringing and attachment style. Studies of the role of interpersonal attraction mainlyfocused on the relationship between interpersonal attraction and satisfaction. Thecurrent study combined the morality and interpersonal attraction, as the moralcleansing effect as the breakthrough point, examined the moral impact oninterpersonal attraction.Moral cleansing effect is derived from the "Macbeth effect", which refers to thephenomenon when the individual does immoral things, he will be favored cleanhimself to reduce the inner moral guilt. Researchers thought that everyone has anideal moral concept, when personal instant moral consciousness and moral conceptshave a gap between the ideal, it will certainly take the compensation behavior toachieve the ideal moral concept. On the basis of this, Zhong and Liljenquist (2006)put forward moral cleansing effect, namely the individual tend to make a pro-socialbehavior to compensate after the unethical behavior.Using interpersonal attraction as the dependent variable, the current studyinvestigated the influence of moral cleansing effect on interpersonal attraction. Itaimed to study if people will make a high evaluation to moral compensation under thecondition of immoral concept launched. In addition, this study also explored theinfluences of gender, self-esteem and target person’ gender on interpersonal attraction. The current study randomly assigned125students to two groups, some of themwere asked to recall their immoral behavior, the control group didn’t recall. And theparticipants were asked to read an advertisement of a target person, and then toevaluate the level of attractiveness of the target. Finally the participants completed theRosenberg self-esteem scale. Results of the study showed that:1) after recallingimmoral behavior, the participants would give higher attraction assessment to the thetarget than the control group. It means that the moral cleansing effect can influenceinterpersonal attraction.2) the interaction between moral and the target’s gender issignificant, namely the moral cleansing effect only had an significant effect when thetarget was the opposite sex of participants.3) self-esteem didn’t moderate the effect ofmorality on interpersonal attraction. But in female subjects, self-esteem can be used topredict interpersonal attraction, and the self-esteem scores were significantly higherwhen participants judged the same gender target than judging the opposite sex target.The results proved that the moral cleansing effect will affect interpersonal attraction.