Who wants to wash away their sins? Guilt and shame proneness and behavioral moral cleansing endorsement: a pilot study

Alexandra Maftei,Ioan-Alex Merlici

doi:10.18662/brain/12.4/260

Abstract

In our pilot cross-sectional study, we aimed to explore the associations between guilt and shame proneness and moral cleansing endorsement. Our sample consisted of 484 adults (73.3% females), aged 18 and 53 (M=24.09, SD=7.32). We used a novel approach to explore moral cleansing mechanisms, i.e., a two-item scale assessing behavioral cleansing endorsement (one's agreement with the idea that people must "wash away" their immoral acts by acting in ethical ways that would "clean" their moral debt). In addition to the significant associations that we found between moral cleansing endorsement and the guilt and shame proneness dimensions (i.e., negative behavior evaluation, repair action tendencies, negative self-evaluation, and withdrawal action tendencies), results also suggested that moral cleansing endorsement was significantly predicted by overall guilt and shame proneness. More specifically, we found that higher levels of guilt and shame proneness might account for higher moral cleansing endorsement levels. We also found important associations with participants' age: our findings suggested that the higher the age, the higher the endorsement for moral actions aimed to "clean" immoral deeds. Results are discussed in relation to cultural-related factors.

Highlights

How tempting is the opportunity to wash away your sins, following an immoral act? Philosophers, theologists, and many psychologists tried to answer this question for a along the time
The repair action tendencies dimension [guilt] was significantly associated with both shame factors, i.e., negative self-evaluation and withdrawal action tendencies
We proposed a novel approach, using a two-item scale that assessed participants' agreement to the idea that people must wash away their immoral acts by acting in ethical ways that would "wash away their sins"

Summary

Introduction

How tempting is the opportunity to wash away your sins, following an immoral act? Philosophers, theologists, and many psychologists tried to answer this question for a along the time. Harkrider et al (2013) explored the effects of incentives and consequences of one's actions on moral cleansing, suggesting that " moral cleansing serves a positive role by reaffirming a person's moral identity, too much affirmation can cause people to relax their moral strivings and subsequently engage in even more unethical behavior, including cheating" (p.133). Moral licensing (ML) is a cognitive reasoning by which less ethical or morally questionable behaviors are justified using previously performed moral actions (Blanken et al, 2015) This specific effect was generally explored in various experimental designs that generally suggested that ML mechanisms generally relax one's moral standards and allow individuals to engage in subsequent unethical or morally ambiguous behaviors (e.g., Ahmad et al, 2020; Engel & Szech, 2020; Loi et al, 2020; Mullen & Monin, 2016; Monin & Miller, 2001). MC describes the compensatory behavior people engage in to reaffirm one's core values and reduce the psychological discomfort following immoral deeds (Ayal & Gino, 2012; Harkrider et al, 2013; Sachdeva et al, 2009)

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