Stanley Matthew L, Henne Paul, De Brigard Felipe
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708-0743, USA.
Department of Philosophy, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2019 Apr;47(3):441-454. doi: 10.3758/s13421-018-0880-y.
Having positive moral traits is central to one's sense of self, and people generally are motivated to maintain a positive view of the self in the present. But it remains unclear how people foster a positive, morally good view of the self in the present. We suggest that recollecting and reflecting on moral and immoral actions from the personal past jointly help to construct a morally good view of the current self in complementary ways. More specifically, across four studies we investigated the extent to which people believe they have changed over time after recollecting their own moral or immoral behaviors from the personal past. Our results indicate that recollecting past immoral actions is associated with stronger impressions of dissimilarity and change in the sense of self over time than recollecting past moral actions. These effects held for diverse domains of morality (i.e., honesty/dishonesty, helping/harming, fairness/unfairness, and loyalty/disloyalty), and they remained even after accounting for objective, calendar time. Further supporting a motivational explanation, these effects held when people recollected their own past actions but not when they recollected the actions of other people.
拥有积极的道德品质是个人自我认知的核心，人们通常会在当下努力维持对自己的积极看法。但目前尚不清楚人们如何在当下培养对自我的积极且道德良好的看法。我们认为，回忆和反思个人过去的道德与不道德行为，以互补的方式共同有助于构建对当前自我的道德良好看法。更具体地说，在四项研究中，我们调查了人们在回忆自己个人过去的道德或不道德行为后，认为自己随时间发生变化的程度。我们的结果表明，与回忆过去的道德行为相比，回忆过去的不道德行为与自我认知中更强的差异感和随时间的变化感相关。这些影响适用于道德的不同领域（即诚实/不诚实、帮助/伤害、公平/不公平以及忠诚/不忠诚），并且即使在考虑了客观的日历时间后仍然存在。进一步支持动机性解释的是，当人们回忆自己过去的行为时会出现这些影响，但回忆他人的行为时则不会。
