The Influence Of Justification On Promise-breaking Of Different Individuals

In daily life,individuals sometimes chase profits by finding many excuses to rationalize their own immoral behavior,this phenomenon even happened for people who have moral standards and consider themselves morally.The process that people find “perfectly valid” reasons for their questionable behaviors was called self-serving justifications.It can ease the conflict between maintaining a positive self-image and maximizing self-interest.However,most studies focus on the role justification played among individual dishonesty,few studies explored the role justification played in interpersonal circumstances.Our study selected a common type of interpersonal dishonesty—promises-breaking and explores how justification prompts different individuals to conduct promise-breaking behavior.Study 1 aims to explore how justification prompts different individuals to conduct promise-breaking behavior.In this study,we employed a new task called the card-guessing task to investigate whether self-serving justification impacts participants’ promise-breaking behaviors and differs in two groups of participants who usually behaved more honestly vs.dishonestly.Furthermore,this study was aimed to find the association between the justification effect and norm-abiding preference.The results revealed that the heterogeneity of using justifications of different individuals and such heterogeneity might be due to a difference in norm-abiding preference.Whereas dishonest people did not care about social norms and always broke the promise,honest people demonstrated less of a justification effect,the more they were concerned about social norms.Study 2 used ERP technology to further explore how justification affects the decision-making process of the honest group and the dishonest group.The result suggests that the N350 negative wave amplitude produced by the honest group in ambiguous conditions was significantly lower than in unambiguous condition,indicating that the participants in the honest group used justification to reduce the conflicts between self-interest motivation and the motivation of keeping positive self-image.For the dishonest group,although there was no significant difference in the N350 amplitude between the ambiguous condition and unambiguous condition,the significant difference in the P2 and P300 amplitude between two conditions was observed.This suggested that for dishonest people,they may already form their promise-breaking intention in the early stage of their decision process and may sensitive to the rewards.Overall,the above results indicated that justification would affect the promise-breaking behaviors and such influence had different effects on diverse individual groups.The participants in the honest group would use the information in their environment to justify their promise-breaking behaviors,but the higher they inclined to abiding the social norm,the less likely they would use justification to conduct promise-breaking behavior.For the dishonest group,although they could perceive social norms,their behavior was less restricted by social norms.Our results indicated that we should develop diverse measurements to limit dishonesty.For the participants in the honest group,highlighting social norms is the key to restricting them for using justification and can inhibit their interpersonal unethical behaviors.As social norms consisted of empirical expectations that indicates what other people do and normative expectation that indicates what other people approve of,prompt the positive values of other people could influence the empirical expectation and normative expectation,thus increase their tendency to comply with social norms.For the participants in the dishonest group,their self-interest motivation was strong,which allowed them to ignore the impact of social norms when making decisions.Therefore,external punishment may be a better way to limit their dishonesty.