明知故犯？故意不道德行为的影响因素和心理过程

Violate Knowingly? Factors and Psychological Mechanism of Intentional Unethical Behavior

故意不道德行为是指个体在明知行为违背了道德规范、但仍采取的不道德行为。研究表明,故意不道德行为存在众多诱发因素,其中道德自我概念具有重要的自我调节作用,在行为发生前后都产生重要影响。本文对故意不道德行为的影响因素进行了梳理,探索其行为前后的心理过程,并对既有的研究框架进行了整合,构建了从诱发因素、动机、心理冲突、调节、决策行为及行为后体验和调节机制的一系列过程。并在回顾的基础上,提出了四点未来可能的研究方向,包括强化不道德行为的作用机制探索、从心理动机视角理解和抑制不道德行为、对诱发不道德行为的无意识偏向的关注和拓展目前的研究方法和研究情境。

Intentional unethical behavior, characterized by breaking the daily standards and violating the moral compass consciously, is currently widespread in the public fields and private spaces and gives rise to immense economic and social cost. In this paper, we constructed a process model of conducting intentional unethical behavior, which depicted the inducing factors and underlying pre-violation and post-violation psychological mechanisms from the perspective of self-concept maintenance theory and moral dissonance theory. In psychology, behavioral ethics, management, and cognitive neuroscience field, loads of researchers have explored factors which would induce individuals to violate social norms consciously and conduct intentional unethical behaviors in specific cultural and social contexts. This paper reviewed the influence of both individual factors and contextual factors on intentional unethical behavior respectively. Individual factors refer to the personal characteristics or attributes, including physical, unconscious, cognitive factors and personality factors. Contextual factors refer to the external features when people perceive about the outside world, including surrounding settings, alert cues, time cues and interpersonal interactions. What＇s more, previous papers have showed that most of individual factors, in essence, drive people to behave unethically through thriving to obtain self-interest and through exploiting self-control resources, during which contextual factors would weaken or strengthen the effect. But how do these factors exert impacts on people＇s intentional unethical behavior？ According to previous studies, two competitive motivations （the motivation of maintaining moral self-concept vs. the motivation of grabbing the interest） play an underlying role in the process including the evaluation of potential costs and benefits, pre-justification of＇the impending violations, occurrence of unethical behaviors and post-justification of the happened violations. When facing temptations to conduct unethical behaviors or violations, people would first perceive the threats to be moral self-concept. The motivation of maintaining a positive self-image would be then activated and the pre-violation self-justification strategies （such as tokens preference, self-serving altruism and moral licensing） were to be adopted to buffer the inner conflict, which can help to balance the two motivating forces. Eventually people would conduct unethical behavior in comfort zone, where they gain some financial benefits but still maintain their positive moral self-concept. That means people would consciously avoid minor unethical behavior, which would not bring significant external interest, neither major unethical behavior which would be at the expense of spoiling positive self-concept. After conducting unethical behavior, moral self-concept would be threatened and thus the motivation of maintaining positive self-image would be activated again. In this situation, through specific post-violation self- justification strategies （such as moral cleansing, moral disengagement, motivated forgetting and moral hypocrisy）, moral self-concept would eventually be protected. Future research is expected to give more emphasis on exploring behavioral and psychological mechanisms, especially understanding and avoiding unethical behavior in the perspective of mental motivation and being aware of unconscious factors and processes. Longitudinal tracking methods and the unethical behaviors in the internet context are also supposed to be paid more attention in the future.