The Effect Of Moral Licensing On Immoral Behavior And Its Mental Mechanism

In daily life, people generally want to maintain a high moral standard. From a social point of view, we advocate the "dedication, honesty and fraternity", and from our own point of view, we believe "a good beginning makes a good ending" and want to do good deeds to approach the society expects. In fact, when people show their good deeds at first, they would allow themselves not to do good deeds then or even to do bad deeds (Monin & Miller,2001). In other words, people abandoned good from evil which is called moral licensing.What would be the effect of moral licensing on the morality of people’s behavior? Recent studies have shown that moral licensing can adjust people’s moral perception. For example, when individuals use positive traits or negative traits to write a brief story about themselves, those who use positive traits make significantly lower charity than those who use negative traits (Sachdeva, Iliev,& Medin,2009). While moral licensing would also to increase their immoral behavior after they feel their own moral consciousness is higher than the ideal moral self-conception. Some studies also use racial discrimination to investigate the effect of moral licensing on immoral behavior in western cultural background (Monin & Miller,2001; Effron, Cameron & Monin,2009; Merritt, Effron,& Monin,2010). In addition, what are the reasons for the effect of moral licensing? Some studies show that moral credits and moral credentials would able to explain the process (Effron & Monin,2010). Moral credits states that it feels fine to commit bad deeds as long as they are offset by prior good deeds of similar magnitude. And moral credentials states good deeds change the meaning of subsequent behavior, good deeds clarify that the subsequent behavior is not a transgression at all.Although research on moral licensing has a lot of achievements, there are still some problems to be solved. Firstly, including the research on the effects of moral licensing on moral behavior, western studies was based on racial discrimination, so in the eastern cultural background whether there is a moral license effect or not? Secondly, in the previous studies to build two models, moral credits and moral credentials, to explain the process of moral licensing. so under what conditions moral credits is suitable to explain the moral licensing and under what conditions moral credentials is suitable to explain the moral licensing? Finally, Whether previous moral behavior affect the subsequent immoral behavior through other factors? If any, is moral self-concept intermediary factor?The results showed that:(1) The effect of moral licensing is existence, that individuals do good deeds in the previous, then do much more immoral behavior, showing " abandon good from evil";(2)With individual of non-pro-social condition, individuals of pro-social behavior condition shows moral licensing in ambiguous immoral behavior, while individuals of non-social behavior condition does not show moral licensing effect;(3)With individual of non-moral credits, individual of moral credits shows moral licensing in prejudice immoral behavior, while individuals of non moral credits does not show moral licensing effect, shows moral behavior consistent.