The impact of moral action and moral values on moral judgment and moral behaviour

This thesis focuses on how recalling past behaviour affects attitudes, intentions and behaviour in the domain of moral decision-making. It extends the existing literature on moral licensing and moral cleansing by exploring whether different individual difference variables moderate such licensing and cleansing effects. Five empirical studies are reported. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the moral licensing and moral cleansing literature and also outlines research into the predictive effects of moral norms on behavioural intentions within the structure of the TPB. In chapter 2, the first study reveals evidence of moral cleansing effects: participants in an immoral condition were more likely to donate to charity than were participants in a moral condition or control group. Study 2 investigated whether self monitoring moderated licensing and cleansing effects. Chapter 3 (study 3) investigated the mediation effect of emotion and the moderation effect of moral identity regarding licensing and cleansing effects on attitudes, intentions and moral norm and behaviour. A partial mediation of condition and behaviour by negative emotions was identified. The results also indicated evidence of a cleansing effect. Moreover, in studies 1, 2 and 3 mediation of the moral norms – intention relationship via attitudes was examined. Moral norms were identified as a strong predictor of charitable donation intentions. In Chapter 4, environmental attitude was investigated as a moderator of the effect of individuals’ past pro-environmental behaviour on TPB components. Internally motivated pro-environmental attitude was found to be a significant moderator. Chapter 5 draws upon the idea that conception of morality differs in different cultures and examined how different moral foundation values and cultural orientations affect moral attitudes and intentions in the UK and Iran. Surprisingly, moral norms were a more useful predictor of intention than were attitudes in both national cultures.