Abstract
In this paper, the moral person is understood through the lens of identity theory in sociological social psychology. Identity theory helps identify the internal dynamics of individuals as moral persons by apprehending their self-views’, behavior, and emotions within and across situations. When the identity process is activated, the cognitive, behavioral, and affective dimensions of individuals inter-relate through a self-regulated control system. When this control system is laced with moral meanings, we see how moral persons emerge and are maintained or challenged in situations. I review studies that I carried out over 2 years that sampled over 3,000 individuals using survey and laboratory research. A series of hypothesis consistent with identity theory were tested to examine individuals’ moral identity, moral behavior, and moral emotions. The findings confirm the predictive power of identity theory in explaining the moral person. Future avenues for research are briefly discussed.
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Notes
In many ways, identity theory has an affinity with appraisal theories in affective sciences. Like identity theory, appraisal theories include an appraisal/cognitive component that evaluates one’s environment in light of one’s current concerns (goals, values, and beliefs), a motor/behavior component, and feeling component (Moors et al. 2013). They also consider other components such as a motivational component (action tendencies) and somatic component that are left unspecified in identity theory. While the appraisal component is central to appraisal theories, the identity standard is core to identity theory. Both an appraisal and one’ identity standard guide behavior and influence one’s emotional response in a situation.
In this way, people may behave morally or immorally for two reasons. First, their moral identity standard meanings may be set at a particular level, and they are guided by these identity standard meanings in terms of how they behave. Alternatively, the level of their moral identity meanings are inconsistent with feedback from the situation (as they interpret others’ views of themselves), and they counteract these perceptions by modifying how hard they work on the basis of the feedback.
In a typical trolley problem, a runaway trolley is traveling down a railway track at a rapid speed and will kill five people who are tied up and unable to remove themselves from the track. You are some distance from the train calamity, and you have a lever, that when you pull it, can switch the trolley to a side track, thereby circumventing the death of the five individuals. However, on this side track is an individual who will be killed by redirecting the runaway trolley to this track. What do you choose to do: 1) do nothing and let the runaway trolley kill the five people or 2) switch the trolley onto the side track that will kill the lone individual?
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Stets, J.E. Understanding the Moral Person: Identity, Behavior, and Emotion. Topoi 34, 441–452 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9233-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9233-4