Self-motives Of Moral Behavior

In the past decade,a great amount of scientific work has investigated aspects of moral judgment and moral behavior in relation to the Moral Foundations proposed and developed by Haidt and Graham(2007).Research results show that there is cultural variability when it comes to levels of sacredness and self-conscious emotions triggered as a result of moral transcendence.But how should these results be interpreted?We propose that moral sacredness and self-conscious emotions be investigated as phenomena related to identity verification.This view comes from Identity theory(Stets&Burke,2000)which proposes that people avoid situations leading to non-verification of identities and that self-conscious emotions are the result of identity non-verifying behavior.These theoretical developments are supported by previous empirical research which showed that when individuals fail to verify their identities,they report increased emotional distress(Stets&Carter,2012).In this research project we attempted to explain moral sacredness and self-conscious emotions by looking at how self-esteem motives of authenticity and worth can predict the behavior and the emotions.We also looked at cross-cultural differences in strength of moral sacredness and the intensity of self-conscious emotionsThe analysis of the first study revealed that:1)Indonesian religious subjects are significantly more reluctant to transgress all the moral foundations than Chinese non-religious subjects;2)Religious salience explains moral sacredness;3)Appraisals of failure to sustain self-authenticity explain unwillingness to transcend the moral foundations of harm,fairness,ingroup,authority and purity in both samples.Results of study two showed that:4)Indonesian respondents report more guilt for purity concerns whereas Chinese respondents report more guilt for harm concerns;5)Chinese respondents repot more shame for transcendence of harm and authority foundations;6)Guilt is explained better by the self-authenticity motive7)Shame is explained better by the self-worth motive...