Speaker
Description
Research on patterns of moral behavior over time indicates that sequential moral decisions can influence one another. More specifically, an initial moral or immoral behavior can increase the likelihood of subsequently engaging in behavior of the same moral value (moral consistency) or the opposite moral value (moral balancing). There are two forms of moral balancing: Moral licensing refers to the phenomenon that acting in a moral way increases the tendency to display immoral behavior, whereas moral compensation refers to the reverse pattern in which acting in an immoral way increases the tendency to display moral behavior. Moral balancing is primarily explained in terms of a continuous conflict between the desire to maintain a positive self-perception and emotional state and the desire to avoid the costs of moral and reap the benefits of immoral behavior. A widely used manipulation in the moral balancing literature is to ask participants to recall and describe a past moral, immoral, or neutral behavior. In an attempt to provide a systematic review of studies on sequential moral behavior using recall tasks that considers all available evidence, we plan to conduct a network meta-analysis of experimental studies that compare moral, immoral, and neutral conditions with respect to subsequent moral decisions. The aims of this review are to better understand how initial behaviors influence target behaviors in the moral domain, to obtain an estimate of the overall effect size of moral compensation and moral licensing, and to identify potential moderators, mechanisms, and boundary conditions of moral balancing.
