Research On The Influence Of Moral Beliefs On Moral Behavior And Moral Happiness

Belief is a kind of personality tendency that people firmly believe in a certain point of view and take actions referring to that point of view.As for morality,moral belief means that people firmly implement certain moral standards.They are willing to accept those standards and put them into practice.Surely,it is stabilized psychology disposition which plays a dominant role in moral behavior mechanism,except for situation factors.Recent studies had found that moral emotions would influence the process of moral judgment and decision-making.Therefore,further researches should focus on the factors of moral emotions arousal.Meanwhile,the well-being caused by moral behaviors were not detected in most of the studies.The reason which leads to those differences effect is to be explored in further studies.This study took honesty as an example of morality and gave insight from the perspective of personal honesty belief.The study was divided into two parts:Pretest is forming the measurement of personal honesty belief by combining implicit attitude and explicit behavior;Experiment is exploring the differences on behavior and emotion arousal between high level subjects and normal level subjects in honesty belief.Concerning the conclusions above,the study discussed a related thought named "Confucius and Yanhui's cheerfulness" in Chinese traditional psychological,which enlightened the interpretation of moral behavior psychological mechanism.The two studies draw the following conclusions:(1)Pretest screened a group of subjects who were in high level of honesty belief and the other group was normal level by combining the Z scores of GNAT implicit honesty attitude measurement and honesty stories assessment.According to the significant group differences in experiment,the screening in pretest was effective.Participants behaved differently in the fees they took by themselves and the behavioral nature reported by themselves.(2)Experiment shows that it is honesty belief but not behavioral nature that have effect on moral well-being.The meaning of life scale and another 8 positive affects were combined into moral well-being(moral well-being=SES + SVS + PA+ MLQ-P-NA-MLQ-S)at the base of well-being.Only if people with high level of moral belief can they attain greater amount of moral well-being.(3)If people act honestly,they would experience more positive effects like calmness,gratitude,hope and inspiration,avoiding negative effects like guilt,neurotic,distraction and unpleasant at the same time.Moreover,when subjects with high level of honesty belief behaved honestly,they could get more energy from hopeful,gratitude,strong and proud feelings and keep appropriate degree of tension,fear,guilt and shame to alert them from breaking rules.Hope,gratitude and guilty are the most typical positive and negative affects caused by honesty,which are important connotation of honest pleasure.(4)A Chinese traditional saying goes that "behaved morally and stay peaceful".The study results showed that it is a kind of peaceful accompanied by "alarm bells ringing".The premise of 'Confucius and Yan Hui's Pleasure' is holding a high concept belief on the way of being a sage.If one could not hold a belief on a deep degree like Confucius,he would not be enjoying like Confucius,even if he practiced like Confucius.