Xiao Qinyu, Li Lok Ching, Au Ying Lam, Tan See Ngueh, Chung Wing Tung, Feldman Gilad
Department of Occupational, Economic, and Social Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria.
Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R., China.
Int Rev Soc Psychol. 2024 May 20;37:10. doi: 10.5334/irsp.945. eCollection 2024.
The moral credential effect is the phenomenon where an initial behavior that presumably establishes one as moral "licenses" the person to subsequently engage in morally questionable behaviors. In line with this effect, Monin and Miller (2001, Study 2) found that participants who initially had an opportunity to hire a job candidate from disadvantaged groups (vs. those without such an opportunity) subsequently indicated preferences that were more likely to be perceived as prejudiced. We conducted a direct replication of this study with US participants on a crowdsourcing platform ( after exclusion = 932). We found no support for a consistent moral credential effect: the effect was close to zero in a scenario where participants indicated their preferences to hire from different ethnicities ( = 0.02 to 0.08, depending on inclusion criteria), and was in the opposite direction in a scenario where they indicated preferences for different genders ( = -0.50 to -0.38). With two extensions to the original study design, we found no evidence that domain-inconsistent moral credentials are less effective in licensing than domain-consistent moral credentials and that moral credentials moderate the association between reputational concern and expressing potentially prejudiced preferences. All materials, data, and analysis scripts are shared at https://osf.io/phym3. This Registered Report has been endorsed by Peer Community In Registered Reports: https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.100726.
道德信用效应是指一种现象，即最初被认为能确立一个人道德形象的行为会“许可”这个人随后做出道德上有问题的行为。与这种效应一致，莫宁和米勒（2001年，研究2）发现，最初有机会从弱势群体中雇佣求职者的参与者（与没有这种机会的参与者相比），随后表现出的偏好更有可能被视为带有偏见。我们在一个众包平台上对美国参与者直接重复了这项研究（排除后 = 932人）。我们没有找到对一致的道德信用效应的支持：在参与者表明他们从不同种族中雇佣的偏好的情景中，效应接近于零（根据纳入标准，效应值为0.02至0.08），而在他们表明对不同性别的偏好的情景中，效应则呈相反方向（效应值为 -0.50至 -0.38）。通过对原始研究设计的两个扩展，我们没有发现证据表明领域不一致的道德信用在许可方面比领域一致的道德信用效果更差，也没有发现道德信用会调节声誉担忧与表达潜在偏见偏好之间的关联。所有材料、数据和分析脚本都在https://osf.io/phym3上共享。这份注册报告已得到同行社区注册报告的认可：https://doi.org/10.24072/pci.rr.100726。
