The role of moral identity in the aftermath of dishonesty

• Dishonest acts may be either continued or compensated.
• We test how moral identity moderates people’s reactions to their own dishonesty.
• High moral identifiers are more likely to prefer compensation over consistency.
• Low moral identifiers are more likely to prefer consistency over compensation.
• Implications for compensatory ethics and for moral identity are discussed.

People lie on a regular basis. However, lying can pose a threat to the self-view of being an honest and moral person. How do people respond to their previous dishonest acts? A way to deal with psychological discomfort arisen for previous lying is reconfirming oneself to be an honest and moral person, for example, by showing subsequent moral behavior. We hypothesize that people engage in this reconfirmation depending on whether their moral identity is central to their self-concept. This was supported in three studies in which, compared to low moral identifiers, high moral identifiers engaged in more efforts to uphold a moral self-image and were more likely to show a compensatory reaction rather than a consistency reaction to their previous dishonesty. Implications for the topics of moral self-regulation and compensatory ethics and for the concept of moral identity are discussed.