关键词: 道德评价, 道德自我知觉, 道德行为, 道德“沾光”效应

Abstract: Moral events always draw attention to themselves. People tend to demonstrate their moral stand by evaluating those events. Previous studies have found that recalling one’s own (rather than others’) past moral behaviors would influence his or her own moral self-perception and moral behaviors. As an intermediate state between one’s own and others’ moral behaviors, could evaluating moral events publicly influence people’s moral self-perception and moral behaviors? If so, how? The current study involves two experiments. The first one is one-factor (3 Evaluation on: moral, immoral and neutral events) between-subjects design with 145 valid participants. Participants were required to write down comments on five events at their respective group and then given tests on their moral self-conception and prosocial intensions. Results showed that 3 groups had significant differences in moral self-perception (F(2,140) = 4.10，p = .019，η2 = 0.06). Participants in moral (M = 5.98, SD = 0.88) or immoral group (M = 6.00, SD = 0.86) had higher moral self-perception than control group (M = 5.61, SD = 0.90), which confirmed the basking in reflected glory effect in moral filed. Although moral evaluation did not have direct influence on prosocial intention (F(2,140) = 0.64，p = .529), the moral self-perception mediated the relationship between moral evaluation and moral behaviors. The 95% confidence interval were [0.019, 0.384] (moral vs. control group) and [0.047, 0.381] (immoral vs. control group) respectively, both of which did not include zero. That is, after moral evaluation, the promotion in moral self-perception could increase prosocial intentions. The second experiment had similar procedure with the first one except for two differences. Firstly, moral self-perception and other positive self-perception (such as smart, humorous) were both measured to verify moral evaluations’ specific effects on moral self-perception. Secondly, actual prosocial behavior instead of prosocial intentions were measured. There were 117 valid participants. The results were consistent with the first experiment. Participants in moral (M = 5.71, SD = 0.88) or immoral group (M = 5.43, SD = 1.12) had higher moral self-perception than control group (M = 4.84, SD = 1.17, F(2,112) = 6.43，p = .002，η2 = 0.10). But this effect did not exist in other self-concepts which were unrelated to morality((F(2,112) =0.91，p = .405). Moral evaluation did not have direct effect on prosocial behavior, but moral self-perception mediated the relationship between moral evaluation and moral behavior. The 97.5% confidence interval were [0.036, 1.010] (moral vs. control group) and [0.007, 0.833] (immoral vs. control group) respectively. In general, evidence from 2 experiments have shown that participating in moral evaluations can improve people’s moral self-perception and moral behaviors. The study expands the basking in reflected glory effect to moral area, which has been widely used in sports and politic fields. Meanwhile, these results can partly explain people’s motivation to do moral evaluation, that is, to help them feel morally good and maintain positive moral image in public. In addition, these moral evaluations can promote prosocial behaviors, which may benefit the society. These results may have some contribution to the supervision of public opinions.

Key words: moral evaluation, moral self-perception, moral behaviors, basking in reflected moral glory effect