Individuals who are very moral in one aspect of their lives can slip into immorality in other areas, according to the scientists at Northwestern University, whose study offers provocative insights in to how saints turn into sinners.

Previous studies have demonstrated that people are motivated both by the warm glow which is a result of a good behavior and recognition of unpleasant consequences of inappropriate behavior in a long run. But the Northwestern study has found for the first time that perhaps individuals whose glow is much warmer than average are more likely to regulate their conduct by behaving in a different, opposite manner or passing up opportunities to behave morally.

The researchers, led by Douglas Medin, a professor of Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, based their conclusions on the results of the three studies, which involved 46 participants. For each experiment, the volunteers were told that they were performing a handwriting test at Northwestern's Center for Handwriting Analysis. They also were asked if they would like to make a donation up to $10 for a charity purposes.

All experiments included a condition of positive and negative traits. In the positive-traits condition, the subjects needed to copy words such as kind, caring, generous and honest. In the negative condition, they were asked to write down words such as selfish, dishonest and cruel. All the participants had to think very carefully about what was the meaning of each word before writing a self-relevant composition that involved the words. In order to provide a control condition, the first experiment also included a neutral condition with words such as tree, home and dog.

The results revealed that individuals who wrote a story including positive traits, donated one-fifth as much money to a charity of their choice as those who were writing stories with negative traits. In contrast, the participants whose stories involved negative traits, were found to act more selflessly. Overall, they donated about 5 dollars in the negative-traits condition, about three dollars in the control condition and about one dollar in the positive-traits condition.

In the experiment number two, the subjects had to perform the same task with one exception that this time they were randomly assigned to to 4 different groups and were asked to use the words to write a story in particularly about either themselves or someone very close to them. The first group wrote positive stories about themselves, the second group wrote positive stories about others, group number three wrote negative stories about themselves, and finally, the last group had to write negative stories about others.

The investigators found that changes in self-concept would happen when study participants wrote from a first-person, rather than from a third-person, perspective. The moral-cleansing and moral-licensing effects were observed only when the participants were writing about themselves. In the positive condition, individuals who wrote about themselves were less likely to donate money to charity, whereas those who wrote about others were found to donate the most. On the contrary, people in the negative condition who wrote about themselves donated more, when compared to those who wrote quite an unpleasant story about other people.

In the third study, researchers analyzed environmental-related behaviors and included neutral, positive-traits and negative-traits conditions. The subjects were asked to play roles of managers of manufacturing plants and needed to make a decision about putting very expensive filters on their smokestacks.

The participants were told that all the managers in their field had gotten together and decided to run the filters 60 per cent of the time. So prices were more expensive for anyone who would choose to run the filters more than 60 per cent of the time. The study found that people in the neutral condition ran their filters between 60 and 65 per cent of the time; those in the negative condition ran them 73 per cent of the time; and those in the positive condition ran them 55 per cent of the time.

The study, titled 'Sinning Saints and Saintly Sinners: The Paradox of Moral Self-Regulation', has been published in the journal Psychological Science.

Tags: Personal Growth, Morals

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