The Impact Of Power And Status On Moral Hypocrisy

Moral hypocrisy refers to a motivation for people to take different moral standards to judge oneself and others, that is in the face of ethical conducts, one will think that they are more moral than others, and as to immoral behaviors, one thinks that other people are more immoral than him/her. Power is the control of valuable resources and status can be considered respectable.This paper focuses on the hot issue in moral psychology studies- moral hypocrisy,explores how power and status affect the moral hypocrisy of college students, and examines their regulation effects on moral hypocrisy by creatively combining both the power and status. It provides theoretical value to further clarify the psychological mechanism of moral hypocrisy and presents practical reference value to advocate the building of a society with public order and morals.Based on the research means and methods of previous studies, this paper randomly selected students of several universities in Wuhan city as participates, adopted the method of role play to inspire their sense of power and status, and collected the indicators of moral hypocrisy thorough monetary tasks assignment and moral events assessment to examine the impacts on moral hypocrisy under the individual effects of power or status and under their interaction.The conclusions obtained through three experiments are as follows:1. High-power will increase moral hypocrisy;2. High-status can make the individual shows more moral behavior;3. People in low-status and in low-status but with a lot of power will encourage others to unethical behavior;4.Low-status but with high-power individuals also shows moral hypocrisy.