Do moral action and moral prediction go hand in hand? Exploring morality as a function of self-regulation.

摘要

Psychologists have long been directing their energy to the domain of moral judgment or moral prediction, assuming that when extended to moral behaviour, results will prove consistent. The aim of this research was to explore the dissociation between moral prediction and moral behaviour. Pilot research suggests that people expect others to act less morally than they say they would. The results of two experiments, however, suggest the opposite. In both studies, participants were assigned to either a moral action condition, where they were placed in a moral dilemma, or a moral prediction condition, in which they had to predict their behavior in that dilemma. In Study 1, the Dictator Game was used to measure morality, whereas in Study 2, cheating behaviour was measured. In both experiments, participants acted more morally than they predicted they would. This research has implications for scrutinizing the applicability of previous work on moral self-prediction.