The Influence Of Moral Identity On Prosocial Behavior Under Self-depletion

Pro-social behavior refers to any act that benefits society or others,including acts of altruism,helping behavior,sharing,cooperation etc.According to the strength model of self-control,self-control is some kind of energy or resource inherent and limited.Once consumed by execution,individual will be in the state of ego-depletion,which has a negative impact on cognition,emotion and behavior.Based on the selfish nature of human,many researches did prove that prosocial behavior of individual needs self-control.When individual is in ego-depletion or low level of self-control,they have difficulties in inhibit their own selfish impulse or desires.Studies have shown that ego-depletion lead to low willingness of donation,less helping behavior,and the increase of aggressive behavior.However,the point of the strength model of self-control has been challenged by some evidences,such as enhancing individual motivation to complete a task,or stressing the importance of task,and so on.The effect of ego depletion effect can be attenuated,which were inconsistent with the limited strength of self-control.And the emerging of the process of ego-depletion explain the after-effect of ego-depletion from a unique perspective.This theory contends that after the self-control is executed,individual would be more willing to complete "want to" task,not "have to" task.And the model also claim that whether a things for individual is "want to" or "have to" may depends on individual factor.Therefore,moral identity as an important predictor of pro-social behavior may influence the evaluation and judgment of pro-social behavior.In another words,the different level of moral identity may determine the pro-social motivation and performance of individual under the ego-depletion from the perspective of the process of ego-depletion.Therefore,in this research,study 1 was carried out to explore the pro-social motivation of different level of moral identity individual under the ego-depletion from the implicit view;Second,we explore the moderate role of moral identity between ego-depletion and pro-social behavior;At last,we will try to prime individual’s moral identity to attenuate negative effect of ego-depletion.Moreover,we want to explore under the priming condition individual’s attentional bias toward altruistic words may play important role of attenuating after-effect of ego-depletion.Results showed that:(1)ego-depletion would not affect individual’s implicit altruistic motives.as expected,we found that individual with high level of moral identity has strong prosocial motives,and individual with low level would show less prosocial tendencies.We concluded that prosocial behavior for high level of moral identity may be a "want to" task,and for low level of moral identity may be not so.(2)from the perspective of behavior performance,moral identity played a moderate role between ego-depletion and prosocial behavior.Results showed that individual with high level of moral identity can still insist on doing prosocial behavior.However,those with low level of moral identity would reduce the prosocial behavior.(3)The prime of moral identity would ease the negative effect of ego-depletion on the performance of individual with low level of moral identity through the inhibition of attentional bias towards egoistic words.