Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: People are generally motivated to appear moral to others in order to gain trust and be liked.However, there may be conditions under which people may be motivated to appear less moral to others in order to be liked.Given previous research that people often tend to derogate and dislike "do-gooders" and "moral rebels," we hypothesized that people will be motivated to downplay their level of morality in interpersonal interactions after privately receiving feedback that they are far more moral than their peers.Furthermore, we predicted these effects would occur in the realm of morality, but not the realm of intelligence.Hypotheses were partially supported by the results of four studies.Although studies provided evidence that people prefer to be seen as intellectually superior to their peers rather than morally superior on affective measures, other studies provided no behavioral evidence that fear of being seen as a "goody-two-shoes" leads people to downplay their moral behavior. Table of Contents
Author: Colleen M. Cowgill
Institution: Ohio University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2755444748