Moral in the future, better now: Moral licensing versus behavioral priming in children and the moderating role of psychological distance.

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]