Self-Regulation after Temptation?

AbstractAlthough moral cleansing—a form of self-regulation—has frequently been studied, existing evidence is mixed and its prerequisites remain unclear. We hypothesize that large, salient deviations from self-defined morality require regulation through moral cleansing, whereas small, inconspicuous deviations are tolerated and lead to continued misbehavior. Using an incentivized online experiment, we measure participants’ baseline morality before using temptations to induce deviations. We find that weak temptations lead to small reductions in moral behavior that remain uncorrected. However, we observe that larger deviations induced by strong temptation do not lead to compensation