Effects Of Power On The Consistency Of Moral Behavior

Almost all researches on the relationship between power and moral behavior are exploring the effects of power on moral behavior,but never explore whether there is a difference in the follow-up ethical behavior of individuals after different moral acts,that is,the effects of power on the consistency of moral behavior.This paper has designed three studies to examine this issue.Study 1 used a questionnaire to measure the sense of personal power,examined the relationship among power,the nature of past behavior(moral vs immoral)and the subsequent willingness to help others,and discovered the interaction between power and the nature of past behavior: For the low-power participants,there is no difference in the willingness to help after recalling moral or immoral behavior,but for the high-power participants,recalling moral behavior can leads to stronger willingness to help relation to recalling immoral behavior.After recalling moral behavior,high-power participants showed more willingness to help than low-power participants,conversely,after recalling immoral behavior,high-power participants showed less willingness to help than low-power participants.That is,high-power participants demonstrated behavioral consistency,while low-power participants demonstrated fluctuant behavior(moral licensing and moral compensation).To further validate this finding,study 2 and 3 used the word-search task to induce participants' high/low power sense,and found the phenomenon consistent with study 1:After recalling moral behavior,high-power participants showed more helping behavior than low-power participants,however,after recalling immoral behavior,high-power participants showed more deception.This is the first study on the relationship between power and the consistency of moral behavior and it turned out that high-power individuals tend to show behavioral consistency,and low-power individuals tend to show fluctuant behavior.The author argues that this innovative discovery can help us to predict the moral behavior of individuals with different power more reasonably.