The Effects Of Ego-depletion On Unethical Behavior

Self-control helps people to resist temptation,and it’s mental resource that helps people to achieve long-term goals.There are studies show that the consumption of self-control resources may lead to the lack of self-control ability,and then people would perform a variety of unethical behaviors which is called after-effect.Unethical behaviors,as a kind of after-effect,have got much attention from researchers.What’as more,some stydies show that the after-effect could be relieved by some methods.This essay takes moral identity as an inportant factor and explores the mechanism of moral identity under the influence of ego-depletion onunethical behavior.In study 1,with the form of scale,we took 228 workng staffs as the object of study to measure their state of self-control,moral identity,and unethical behavior.The results show that ego-depletion has a significant predictive effect on immoral behavior,and moral identity plays a mediating role in the effect of ego-depletion on immoral behavior.A 2(control group/depletion group)×2(moral identity priming group VS control group)between-subject pre-postdesign was used in study 2,132 college students were randomly divided into 4 groups.The state of ego-depletion was measured by letter-crossing task and the activation of moral identity was manipulated by scrambled-words task.In addition,we measured unethical behavior with anagram method and measured the factors that may affect the result in form of scale.The results show that moral identity can alleviate the enhancement effect of ego-depletion on unethical behavior.That is to say,under low moral identity condition,participants of ego-depetion group show more unethical behaviors than participants of control group.And under high moral identity condition,there is no difference in performance of unethical behavior between participants of ego-depletion group with participants of control group.Conclusions:(1)Ego-depletion has a significant effect on unethical behavior,and can effectively predict the unethical behavior of an individual.(2)Moral identity serves as the intermediary role in the enhancement effect of ego-depletion on unethical behavior.(3)Moral identity could relieve the enhancement effect of ego-depletion on unethical behavior.