Struggling with your “self-concept”—that is, the thoughts and beliefs you use to define who you are—can seem like a deep, philosophical exercise. But to a perhaps surprising extent, it can affect your daily life in tangible ways.
Studies have shown that people who do not have a clear self-concept have more anxiety and depressionless satisfactory relationshipsand overall lower prosperitycompared to people who do.
New research from Kellogg Associate Professor of Marketing Rima Touré-Tillery and Jane Jiaqian Wang of the National University of Singapore goes even further, finding that unclear self-concept also leads to bad behavior.
“When people don’t know who they are, they think their moral actions don’t really reflect who they are,” says Touré-Tillery. “The boundaries between right and wrong don’t work the same way. If they believe they don’t know themselves, it can lead to lies and deception.”
But all is not lost. people can boost their self-esteem. And even if people are unable (or unwilling) to establish their sense of self, there are ways to reduce their bad behavior.
Keep or donate?
Touré-Tillery and Wang suggest that a lack of clear self-concept could cause moral disengagement, which leads people to distance themselves from their actions to justify their bad behavior and thus view themselves as less responsible for that behavior .
Through a series of studies, Touré-Tillery and Wang showed how this happens – and how it can be mitigated.
In the first study, they recruited 149 participants from a US university to complete a standardized twelve-question survey that assessed their level of self-concept clarity. They rated their agreement with statements such as, “In general, I have a clear sense of who and what I am.”
Three months later, the research team asked the same participants to take a survey assessing how they might respond to twelve ethical scenarios. For example, buying a shirt, wearing it, and then returning it to the store. Or allowing someone at work to be blamed for something they did. The team found that those who scored lower on the self-concept clarity scale of the original survey were less likely to do the right thing.
“The results show that people’s level of self-concept clarity can predict their moral behavior over time,” says Wang.
The link between self-concept clarity and morality also applies to charitable behaviors like charitable giving, the researchers find—and it spans cultures.
The team recruited nearly 300 Chinese participants to complete the same self-perception clarity assessment as in the first study. Participants were paid for their time and then received a note thanking them for their participation, along with a half Chinese yuan (about seven US cents) bonus. They were asked if they would like to keep their bonus or donate it to the World Wildlife Fund.
Participants with lower scores were less likely to donate their bonus.
“This also allowed us to control for potential cross-cultural differences,” says Wang. “Given that Chinese people often adapt their behavior based on the situation and generally have lower clarity of self-perception, we wondered if the results would differ. But we found that people were just as likely to act morally based on the clarity of their self-concept.”
Fraud for financial gain
A third study showed a causal relationship between self-concept and morality and showed that self-concept clarity could be temporarily manipulated. This time, the team recruited 638 participants from a survey market and divided them into two groups.
One group read a list of statements that described a clear self-concept (“My beliefs about myself do not change often”), while the other group read a list of statements that reflected a vague self-concept (“My beliefs for myself they change often”). Participants chose one of the statements and spent one minute writing about a related experience.
The participants were then told that they were part of a study that would help researchers understand the chances of different US coins landing on heads or tails. Participants chose a coin, flipped it five times and reported their results. But before they started, some participants said they would get five cents each time the coin landed on heads.
Those who were not informed of this financial incentive reported flipping similar numbers of heads and tails. And participants who had read statements that reflected a clear self-concept also reported a similar number of heads and tails, even when told about the financial motive.
But people who knew about the financial motive and who had begun to feel they had a vague self-concept reported having more heads than tails.
“They were more likely to cheat for financial gain,” says Touré-Tillery. “It’s not a million-dollar embezzlement, but if everybody engages in that behavior, it can become problematic, and that’s really what we were trying to capture.”
The team then conducted two additional studies to explore other possible explanations for the relationship between self-concept and ethical behavior. Previous research has shown, for example, that Self-concept clarity and self-esteem are positively correlated. But their studies confirmed that the association between self-concept clarity and ethical behavior was not driven by participants’ self-esteem or mood.
An easy solution: an honorable pledge
If low self-concept clarity leads to bad behavior, is there anything that can be done?
In another study, researchers again asked participants to flip coins, providing them with a financial incentive to get heads. But this time, the team had about half of the participants sign an honor pledge beforehand that contained statements such as, “It is unethical to lie to get a study bonus, regardless of my personal circumstances,” and “ Cheating in the study is inappropriate because it harms hard-working researchers who deserve to be treated with respect and honesty.”
The pledge worked: participants from both groups who signed the honor pledge reported about the same number of heads. Conversely, those who did not sign the honor pledge and had low self-perception clarity again reported a greater number of heads to receive a bonus.
“When you remind people that it’s not okay to justify bad behavior, it prompts them to reflect on their moral self,” says Wang. “It’s a simple but targeted way to change behavior.”
Definition of ethics
Of course, not everyone agrees on what “ethical” means. In a final study, 813 participants completed the same self-concept writing task from previous studies and were then asked if they would volunteer two minutes of their time to fill out a survey promoting gender-neutral bathrooms.
They would receive no additional compensation, they were told, but the research team would donate twenty-five cents to the National Center for Transgender Equality on their behalf if they participated. The research team also measured participants’ political views and whether they thought promoting gender-neutral toilets was ethical or unethical.
The results were split along political lines. Liberal participants with high self-concept clarity were more likely to participate in the survey than liberal participants with low self-concept clarity. However, self-perception clarity had no effect on conservative participants’ willingness to participate in the survey, as they generally “didn’t think promoting these baths was an ethical behavior to begin with,” Wang said.
Knowing yourself can be difficult — especially in times of turmoil. But interventions in schools and workplaces that help people reflect on values, goals and meaning in their work could help, the researchers say. “It could go a long way in reducing cases of unethical behavior and ethical violations,” says Touré-Tillery. “And it’s a very simple exercise.”
And if there’s a situation where the stakes—and the potential for cheating—are high, a price promise can make a real difference in the results.
“If you can remind people of their moral standards and the consequences of their behavior, it could really prevent unethical behavior,” says Wang.
