Testing a Social-Cognitive Model of Moral Behavior: The Interactive Influence of Situations and Moral Identity Centrality

Testing a Social-Cognitive Model of Moral Behavior: The Interactive Influence of Situations and Moral Identity Centrality Karl Aquino Dan Freeman Americus Reed II Vivien K. G. Lim Will Felps

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Testing a Social-Cognitive Model of Moral Behavior: The Interactive Influence of Situations and Moral Identity Centrality 2009 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 10.1037/a0015406 aquino2009-moral aquino2009-moral.txt, the project's staged copy 04ba73353c8981d9ec6284b0612d0573161dbd67 personal-copy social-psychology

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0 spans located by searching the stored text for the quote's exact words, allowing any whitespace between them mechanism Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. moral identity accessibility and moral behavior Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. behavioural-experiment behavioural-experiment Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mechanisms moral behavior depends on the situational accessibility of moral identity: cues that make moral identity salient in the working self-concept increase moral motivation, while cues that suppress it (e.g. money/material primes) reduce moral behavior Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Only a small number of situational factors were examined, out of an unknown and multifarious range. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Neither moral prime used (Ten Commandments recall, handwriting task) has practical utility for actually promoting moral action outside the lab. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The posited dissonant psychological tension that is supposed to drive the deactivation of moral identity was never directly measured. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The studies do not address the psychological or emotional aftermath for high-centrality participants who were induced to behave selfishly. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Studies 1 and 2 measured behavioral intentions rather than actual behavior (Study 3 was run to address this). Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Study 3 did not measure the proposed mediator; deactivation of moral identity there is inferred from Study 2 rather than observed. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The cumulative-experience explanation offered for why some people show enduring and others variable moral commitment is not rigorously tested by the data. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. The predicted three-way interaction with reward size ($50 vs $150) in Study 3 was not supported. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. a minimal-difference control condition: the ONLY thing that differed was the general knowledge items eliminates: that anything else in the procedure - length, difficulty, instructions - produced the effect attributed to the moral prime · outcome (stated by the tagger, no quotation): held Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. moral prime moral prime Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. current accessibility current accessibility Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. moral identity centrality moral identity centrality Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. activation potential activation potential Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. working self-concept working self-concept Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. moral action moral action Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. THE PRIME WORKS LEAST ON THE PEOPLE IT IS ABOUT, AND THIS IS PREDICTED IN ADVANCE RATHER THAN EXPLAINED AFTERWARDS: `Quotation withheld.` higgins1977 raises exactly this variable in ONE CONJECTURAL SENTENCE - `There may even be individual differences in the relative accessibility of different categories` - and does not test it. This paper builds four studies on it and finds it REVERSES the priming effect, so the same trait that makes someone morally consistent is the one that makes them unprimeable. A 1977 aside and its test 32 years later, both in this corpus. (The term `chronic accessibility` is Higgins, King & Mavin 1982 and appears nowhere in higgins1977.) A study sampling only committed people would find nothing and conclude the effect is not real Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. PRIMING PLACED AS ONE ROUTE AMONG THREE TO THE SAME STATE: `Quotation withheld, to REPEATED ACTS OF self-definition (Higgins, 1989).` Three roads to accessibility, of which the experimental one is only the fastest. That sentence does more for a corpus about priming than most results do, because it says what priming is an INSTANCE OF - and it makes the individual-difference moderator in this paper a consequence of the theory rather than a nuisance variable. (The quote stops before `self-definition`, which the staged text renders as a hyphen-loss fusion.) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. AND STUDY 4 REVERSES THE MODERATION OVER TIME, WHICH A ONE-SHOT STUDY WOULD HAVE SCORED AS A NULL: initially the prime does little for high-centrality people, exactly as the ceiling account predicts. But under repeated feedback that others are behaving selfishly, `Quotation withheld.` The prime's value is not the initial push but the resistance to decay. A corpus that records only peak effect sizes cannot represent this finding at all Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. THE MODERATION IS STATED TWICE AND THE SECOND TIME IT IS A RESULT: `Quotation withheld.` The mechanism is a headroom argument, and it is testable: it predicts that any manipulation raising a construct's accessibility will show the same inverse relation to that construct's chronic strength. This record and higgins1977 are the two ends of that claim in this corpus, and the two ends are not equal - higgins1977 says only `THERE MAY EVEN BE individual differences in the relative accessibility of different categories`, a speculation with no test attached, while this paper makes that variable its moderator and predicts where a prime will fail Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → social-cognitive theory (Bandura, 2001) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Aquino and Reed's (2002) moral identity Internalization measure Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. builds-on → Muller, Judd, and Yzerbyt's (2005) mediated moderation procedure Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. extends → Walker and Frimer (2007), whose call for systematic exploration of person-situation interaction in the moral domain the framework answers Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. contradicts → research conceptualising moral identity as enduring and stable (Blasi; Colby & Damon; Damon & Hart; Walker & Frimer; Walker & Hennig) Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. moral prime —causes→ current accessibility moral prime current accessibility direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: 'INTERACTIVE INFLUENCE' IS IN THE QUOTE AND IS THE PART THIS EDGE CANNOT CARRY. The measured relation is not 'prime raises accessibility' but 'prime raises accessibility MORE for people low in moral identity centrality, and barely at all for people high in it'. 'increases' is true on average and is what the study found; a reader who stops there has the paper's headline and not its result. The moderation is quoted whole in the first and fourth senses. Weight 0.9 - four studies, and the mediation is formally tested by Muller et al.'s procedure rather than asserted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. current accessibility —causes→ moral action current accessibility moral action direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.9 · note: THE SECOND LEG OF THE MEDIATION, and together with the edge above it is the paper's model written as a path: situation -> current accessibility -> moral action. 'LINKS' is the paper's own verb and it is doing mediation work - this is the summary sentence for Studies 1 and 2 in the general discussion, not a hypothesis. Weight 0.9. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but the span gives current accessibility a mediating role - it connects situational factors and the centrality of moral identity with moral action - and states no increase. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. moral identity centrality —causes→ current accessibility moral identity centrality current accessibility direction on the measure: increases · strength of the relation: 0.85 · note: THE TRAIT LEG, AND IT IS THE ONE THAT MAKES THE PAPER'S RESULT COUNTERINTUITIVE. Centrality raises chronic accessibility - which is why the PRIME does less for people high in it. So this edge and the 'moral prime -> current accessibility' edge point at the same target for opposite reasons, and the graph shows two arrows where the paper has a ceiling. 'moderates' is not in the enforced vocabulary, so nothing here records that the second edge shrinks as the first grows. Weight 0.85 rather than 0.9: this leg is theory plus the Study 1 mediation test, where the prime leg is directly manipulated. Audit 2026-09-28: DOUBTFUL - read against its full span and kept, but current accessibility LINKS centrality to moral action; centrality as a cause of accessibility is loose. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 4 — number of experiments testing the framework Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. Ten — moral-identity priming manipulation in Study 1 Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. 1973 — Darley & Batson seminary-students helping study WHOSE RESULT THIS IS: Darley and Batson (1973) showed - THE EVIDENCE FOR THIS ROW ATTRIBUTES THE WORK TO SOMEBODY ELSE. The cited name is the subject of a result verb and the sentence carries no first-person marker, so the finding, quantity or definition is the CITED author's rather than this record's. The claim is true and the quote is verbatim - what is wrong is whose result the corpus says it is. Nothing edited, nothing withdrawn: the row is marked so a page can name the source. Where the record is a commentary or review, its claim relations layer usually already names the paper being discussed - the record knows at one layer and forgets at another. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the authors hypothesized that increasing the accessibility of moral identity strengthens the motivation to act morally Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the authors hypothesized that decreasing the accessibility of moral identity weakens the motivation to act morally Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. the situational effect was expected to vary with the centrality of moral identity Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. results strongly support the proposed framework Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. situational factors situational factors Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. accessibility of moral identity accessibility of moral identity Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. moral-identity centrality moral-identity centrality Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. moral behavior moral behavior Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. moral identity moral identity Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. social-cognitive framework social-cognitive framework Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. working self-concept working self-concept Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. ANOVA ANOVA Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. correlation correlation about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. hypothesis-testing hypothesis-testing Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. mean mean Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. regression regression Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. standard-deviation standard-deviation about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution. statistical-significance statistical-significance about this quote: QUOTE RECOVERED FROM THE PAPER'S OWN CHARACTERS. The recorded quote was LETTERS-ONLY IDENTICAL to this stretch of the staged text but not an exact substring of it - spaces, hyphens, ligature glyphs or mathematical operators differed, so it could never anchor. This is the file's own text between the same two letters: not produced by a rule about the damage, copied out of the file. Round-trip checked (the recovered span is letters-only equal to the original) and length-checked. The text as originally recorded is kept in evidence as extracted. Quotation withheld because this record is not cleared for redistribution.

The full text of this article is not redistributable, so it is not included here. The evidence sentences are withheld with it; the tag layer and its grounding status remain. The article itself is at https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015406.