The Fairness Of Events And The Impact Of Moral Identity On Ethical Decision-making

From the ancient to modern times,justice has always been the goal pursued by people.Everyone wants to live in a fair environment to get a fair treatment,to the national policy,to queue up to buy medicine,fair covers all aspects of social life.However,in today's society,unfair events are becoming more and more frequent,and some studies have shown that unfair events have an important influence on people's behavior.The previous researches always focused on the effect of mood,circumstance and cognitive factors for moral decision-making.Although justice is closely related to our daily lives and attracting much attention,butthe study of fairness affectmoral decision making is less.Previous studies have shown that the interpretation of the violation of the standard of fairness leads to a stronger tendency of unethical behavior than the interpretation conforms to the standard.In real life,immoral behavior not only occurs frequently in individuals with low moral standards,but also those who have high moral standards.In the field of morality,moral identity is considered to be an important driving force of moral behavior,which has a better explanatory power to moral behavior.Generally speaking,person with high moral identity tend to make moral decisions and do moral behavior than person with low moral identity.As for the fairness of the event,whether there are differences in ethical decision making between person with high moral identity and person with low moral identity,remains to be tested.From the perspective of distributive and procedural justice,this study explores effects of fairness and moral identity on moral decision making.Experiment 1 is a 2(distributive fairness: fair and unfair)x 2(moral identity: high,low)between subjects design.Experiment 2 used 2(procedural justice: fair and unfair)x 2(moral identity: high,low)between subjects design.And the variables are immoral behavior tendency.The results show that:(1)The fairness of events significantly impact individual's moral decision,when the event is fair,individuals' tendency to make unethical behavior is lower than when the event is unfair.While the events involving unfair results,there does not exist significant differences in ethical decision making in different moral identity levels of individual,when the events involving the procedural unfairness,person with low moral identity have significantly strongerimmoral behavior tendency than person withhigh moral identity.(2)When the event is unfair,the individual have significantly weaker positive emotion and stronger negative emotion than when the event is fair.And the negative emotion is significantly weakened and the positive mood is significantly enhanced after making the immoral decision.