Search

Copyright of Acta Comportamentalia is the property of Instituto de Psicologia y Educacion de la Universidad Veracruzana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper introduces frame-specific randomization devices to vary the situational context of an online lying experiment. Participants are asked to report outcomes of random draws from two different sources of uncertainty—decimals of the value of a stock index or a neutrally framed random number generator. The findings show that the frame-specific randomization device is not prone to the social norm effects documented in the literature. Because different environments can evoke different norms, I replicate the experiment in the more constrained setting of a traditional physical laboratory revealing no systematic differences in behavior. Furthermore, I am not able to show that participants who take longer to report are more honest and this is specific to the physical laboratory environment. Finally, the findings reveal gender differences in honesty depending on the environment—males are more honest when they participate in the laboratory as opposed to online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the impact of a key feature of competitive markets on moral behavior: the possibility that a competitor might step in and conclude the deal if a conscientious market actor forgoes a profitable business opportunity for ethical reasons. In a series of experiments, we study whether people invoke the replacement excuse, that is, the argument "if I don't do it, someone else will," to justify narrowly self-interested actions. Our data are consistent with the possibility that the existence of a clear social norm of moral conduct can limit the impact of the availability of the replacement excuse on behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study aims to model the relationship between parent-child interaction and perceived social support with moral behavior, mediated by cultural intelligence, in adolescent female students in Tehran. Methods and Materials: The research method is descriptive and correlational. The statistical population of this study includes all female high school students aged 12 to 16, with a total number of students in the academic year 2022-2023. Four hundred students were selected as the sample using cluster sampling. Data were collected using the Moral Behavior Questionnaire by Sabat and colleagues, the Perceived Social Support Questionnaire by Zimet, Dahlem, Zimet, and Farley (1988), and the Cultural Intelligence Questionnaire by Ang and Earley (2004). Data analysis was performed using SPSS.22 and Smart PLS software, employing descriptive and inferential statistics such as mean, standard deviation, Pearson correlation coefficient, multiple regression, and structural equation modeling. Findings: The research results showed that the model explaining the parent-child interaction, perceived social support, and moral behavior with the mediation of cultural intelligence has a good fit. The results indicated that parent-child interaction has a direct effect on moral behavior (P<0.01). It was also found that perceived social support has a direct effect on moral behavior (P<0.01). Conclusion: The results confirmed that parent-child interaction does not affect moral behavior through the mediating role of cultural intelligence. Finally, other findings showed that perceived social support indirectly affects moral behavior through the mediating role of cultural intelligence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the game-theoretical literature on forming international environmental agreements (IEAs) countries use to be self-interested materialists and stable coalitions are small. This paper analyzes IEA games with identical countries that exhibit Kantian moral behavior. Kantians are concerned with doing the right thing which means that they take those actions and only those actions that they advocate all others take as well. Countries may behave morally with respect to both emissions (reduction) and membership in an IEA. If countries are emissions Kantians or membership Kantians the equilibrium of the IEA games is socially optimal. To model more realistic Kantian behavior, we define an emissions [membership] moralist as a country whose welfare is a weighted average of the welfare of an emissions [membership] Kantian and a materialist. The game with emissions moralists produces stable coalitions not larger than those in the standard game with materialists. The game with membership moralists yields stable coalitions that are increasing in the membership morality. The aggregate emissions decline if the degree of morality of either type of moralists increases. Finally, we characterize the equilibrium of an IEA game with moderate moralists with respect to both emissions and membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This study aimed to predict moral behavior based on psychological well-being and attitude to time, considering the mediating role of self-transcendence and fundamental values. Materials and Methods: The statistical population of this descriptive and correlational study consisted of all students of Bu-Ali Sina University in Hamadan-Iran in the 2018-2019 academic year. The sample size was 372 students selected by the convenient sampling method. The instruments included Psychological Well-being (Diener et al., 1985), Attitude to Time (Mello and Worrell, 2010), Self-transcendence (Levinson et al., 2005), ResearcherMade Scale of Moral Behavior, and Fundamental Values Scale (Jason et al., 2001). Data were analyzed by path analysis using SPSS-25 and LISREL. Results: The results indicated that the proposed model has a good fitness with the empirical data (GFI= 0.95, IFI= 0.98, CFI= 0.95). The results showed that self-transcendence and fundamental values significantly mediate the relationship between moral behavior, psychological well-being, and attitude to time (P< 0.01). Attitude to time and psychological well-being significantly affect moral behavior by mediating self-transcendence and fundamental values. Conclusion: Based on the findings of this research, the probability of performing moral behavior by people with psychological well-being and positive attitude to time can be predicted when people have fundamental values and gain knowledge about them. It is also necessary that these people have reached a level of self-transcendence. Value and self-transcendence connect moral behavior with psychological well-being and attitude to time and facilitate the possibility of moral behavior in social situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The moral licensing literature suggests that representing oneself as moral in the past or the future motivates current immoral behavior. These licensing effects are moderated by psychological distance, which depends, among others, on the concrete vs. abstract nature of the self-representations and temporal distance. Across two studies, we explored these relationships measuring children's altruism using two prospective moral licensing manipulations that varied on one of these dimensions of psychological distance (i.e., the concreteness of the moral primes) while holding temporal distance constant at its upper end (i.e., distant future). Results revealed higher altruism after imagining distant moral behaviors, contrary to the previous findings in other samples (i.e., adults), but only when concrete primes were used. This suggests that behavioral priming instead of moral licensing is the dominant effect in children in these circumstances due to their lower abstraction abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: This study aimed to design a model for predicting moral behavior based on parenting styles and ego-strength with the mediating role of the structure of self-transcendence among university students. Materials and Methods: The statistical population of this descriptive-correlational study included all students of Bu-Ali Sina University of Hamadan city-Iran in the 2020-2021 academic year. Two-hundred eighty-five students were selected using a multi-stage cluster sampling method. The instruments were the moral behavior scale, parenting styles scale, ego-strength scale, and self-transcendence scale. The data were analyzed by path analysis with LISREL software. Results: The results indicated that the proposed model fitted the experimental data (GFI= 0.95, IFI= 0.98, and CFI= 0.97). Also, the results of path analysis indicated that the effects of parenting styles on moral behavior and self-transcendence and the effects of ego-strength and self-transcendence on moral behavior were significant. The results of Sobel's test (z) indicated that the self-transcendence variable has a significant mediating role in the relationship between permissive style (Z= -2.68, P< 0.01), authoritative style (Z= -2.55, P< 0.01), authoritarian style (Z= -3.61, P< 0.01), and ego-strength (Z= 4.56, P< 0.01) with moral behavior. Conclusion: Based on the results, it can be said that parenting styles, ego-strength, and self-transcendence can predict conducting moral behaviors. Also, self-transcendence can be one of the factors that influence the relationship between parenting styles and ego-strength with moral behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades intensive research has been conducted on the implicit learning system in general, and the phenomena we refer to as "intuition." The import of this research suggests that intuition is not an extraordinary mechanism in the hands of a few gifted persons, but a universal neural mechanism with an evolutionary history based in social adaptation. Research further suggests that intuition is not only highly effective in shaping positive responses, but also quite common in human behavior. Such speculation naturally leads to significant implications in all learning theory, and Bowen theory in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within moral psychology, theories focusing on the conceptualization and empirical measurement of people's morality in terms of general moral values -such as Moral Foundation Theory- (implicitly) assume general moral values to be relevant concepts for the explanation and prediction of behavior in everyday life. However, a solid theoretical and empirical foundation for this idea remains work in progress. In this study we explore this relationship between general moral values and daily life behavior through a conceptual analysis and an empirical study. Our conceptual analysis of the moral value-moral behavior relationship suggests that the effect of a generally endorsed moral value on moral behavior is highly context dependent. It requires the manifestation of several phases of moral decision-making, each influenced by many contextual factors. We expect that this renders the empirical relationship between generic moral values and people's concrete moral behavior indeterminate. Subsequently, we empirically investigate this relationship in three different studies. We relate two different measures of general moral values -the Moral Foundation Questionnaire and the Morality As Cooperation Questionnaire- to a broad set of self-reported morally relevant daily life behaviors (including adherence to COVID-19 measures and participation in voluntary work). Our empirical results are in line with the expectations derived from our conceptual analysis: the considered general moral values are poor predictors of the selected daily life behaviors. Furthermore, moral values that were tailored to the specific context of the behavior showed to be somewhat stronger predictors. Together with the insights derived from our conceptual analysis, this indicates the relevance of the contextual nature of moral decision-making as a possible explanation for the poor predictive value of general moral values. Our findings suggest that the investigation of morality's influence on behavior by expressing and measuring it in terms of general moral values may need revision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our pilot cross-sectional study, we aimed to explore the associations between guilt and shame proneness and moral cleansing endorsement. Our sample consisted of 484 adults (73.3% females), aged 18 and 53 (M=24.09, SD=7.32). We used a novel approach to explore moral cleansing mechanisms, i.e., a two-item scale assessing behavioral cleansing endorsement (one's agreement with the idea that people must "wash away" their immoral acts by acting in ethical ways that would "clean" their moral debt). In addition to the significant associations that we found between moral cleansing endorsement and the guilt and shame proneness dimensions (i.e., negative behavior evaluation, repair action tendencies, negative self-evaluation, and withdrawal action tendencies), results also suggested that moral cleansing endorsement was significantly predicted by overall guilt and shame proneness. More specifically, we found that higher levels of guilt and shame proneness might account for higher moral cleansing endorsement levels. We also found important associations with participants' age: our findings suggested that the higher the age, the higher the endorsement for moral actions aimed to "clean" immoral deeds. Results are discussed in relation to cultural-related factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three studies (N = 887) tested the hypothesis that value consistency predicts intended coronavirus disease-2019 (COVID-19) health behaviors and overrides other utility-based motivational factors. Accordingly, Study 1 showed that intentions of social distancing were higher if it was perceived as more value-consistent. The higher value consistency, the less self-interest inconsistency, and the perceived efficacy of social distancing mattered for intentions. On the other hand, Study 2 failed to induce value consistency experimentally. However, correlative results show a moderation pattern similar to Study 1 regarding social distancing intentions, policy support, and devaluation of transgressors. In Study 3, higher value consistency of vaccination reduced the experimental effect of prosocial efficacy but not the effect of self-interest efficacy of the vaccine. The findings are discussed regarding theoretical implications for the interplay of values and utility in motivation. In addition, implications for the potentially ambivalent effects of appealing to values to increase compliance are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces frame-specific randomization devices to vary the situational context of an online lying experiment. Participants are asked to report outcomes of random draws from two different sources of uncertainty—decimals of the value of a stock index or a neutrally framed random number generator. The findings show that the frame-specific randomization device is not prone to the social norm effects documented in the literature. Because different environments can evoke different norms, I replicate the experiment in the more constrained setting of a traditional physical laboratory revealing no systematic differences in behavior. Furthermore, I am not able to show that participants who take longer to report are more honest and this is specific to the physical laboratory environment. Finally, the findings reveal gender differences in honesty depending on the environment—males are more honest when they participate in the laboratory as opposed to online.