How a Weak Sense of Self Encourages Bad Behavior

Grappling with your “self-concept”—that is, the thoughts and beliefs you use to define who you are—might seem like a deep, philosophical exercise. But to a perhaps surprising extent, it can impact your daily life in tangible ways.

Studies have shown that people who do not have a clearly defined self-concept have more anxiety and depression, less satisfying relationships, and lower overall well-being, compared with 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 having an 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,” Touré-Tillery says. “The boundaries between right and wrong don’t work in the same way. If they think they don’t know themselves, it can lead to lying and cheating.”

But all is not lost; people can strengthen their self-concept. And even if people are unable (or unwilling) to solidify their sense of self, there are ways to reduce their bad behavior.

Keep or donate?

Touré-Tillery and Wang propose that not having a clear self-concept could cause moral disengagement, which leads people to distance themselves from their actions to justify their bad behavior and thus perceive 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 attenuated.

In the first study, they recruited 149 participants from a U.S. university to complete an established twelve-question survey that assessed their level of self-concept clarity. They rated their agreement with statements like, “In general, I have a clear sense of who I am and what I am.”

Three months later, the research team asked the same participants to take a survey that assessed how they might respond to twelve moral scenarios. For example, buying a shirt, wearing it, then returning it to the store. Or allowing someone at work to be blamed for something they did. The team found that those with a lower score on the initial survey’s self-concept clarity scale were less likely to do the right thing.

“The results show that people’s self-concept clarity level can predict their moral behavior over time,” Wang says.

The link between self-concept clarity and morality also holds for prosocial behaviors like charitable giving, the researchers find—and it spans cultures.

The team recruited nearly 300 Chinese participants to complete the same assessment for self-concept clarity as in the first study. Participants were paid for their time, and afterward, they received a note thanking them for their participation, along with half a Chinese Yuan (about seven U.S. cents) bonus. They were asked if they would like to keep their bonus or donate it to the World Wildlife Fund.

Participants with a lower score were less likely to donate their bonus.

“This also allowed us to check for potential cross-cultural differences,” Wang says. “Since Chinese people often adapt their behavior based on the situation and generally have lower self-concept clarity, we wondered if the results would differ. But we found that people had this same tendency to act morally based on their self-concept clarity.”

Cheating for financial gain

A third study demonstrated a causal link 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 marketplace and split them into two groups.

One group read a list of statements that described a clear self-concept (“My beliefs about myself don’t change frequently”) while the other read a list of statements that reflected an unclear self-concept (“My beliefs about myself change frequently”). Participants chose one of the statements and spent a minute writing about a relevant experience.

Participants were then told they were part of a study that would help researchers understand the probabilities of different U.S. coins landing on heads or tails. Participants would choose a coin, flip it five times, and report their results. But before they began, some participants were told that they would receive five cents every time the coin lands on heads.

Those who had not been told about this financial incentive reported flipping similar numbers of heads and tails. And participants who had read statements reflecting a clear self-concept also reported a similar number of heads and tails, even if they were told about the financial incentive.

But people who knew about the financial incentive and who had been primed to feel they had an unclear self-concept reported getting more heads than tails.

“They were more likely to cheat for financial gain,” Touré-Tillery says. “It’s not embezzling a million dollars, but if everyone engages in this behavior, it can become problematic, and that’s really what we were trying to capture.”

The team then ran two additional studies to investigate other possible explanations for the link between self-concept and moral behavior. Past research has shown, for instance, that self-concept clarity and self-esteem are positively correlated. But their studies confirmed that the association between self-concept clarity and moral behavior was not driven by participants’ self-esteem or by their mood.

An easy fix: an honor pledge

If low self-concept clarity leads to bad behavior, is there anything that can be done?

In another study, the researchers again asked participants to flip coins, providing them with a financial incentive for getting heads. But this time, the team had about half of the participants sign an honor pledge beforehand that had statements such as, “It is unethical to lie to get a bonus in the study, regardless of my personal circumstances” and “Cheating in the study is inappropriate because it hurts hardworking researchers who deserve to be treated with respect and honesty.”

The pledge worked: participants from both groups who signed the honor pledge reported around the same number of heads. In contrast, those who did not sign the honor pledge and had low self-concept clarity again reported a higher number of heads to get a bonus.

“When you remind people that it is not okay to justify bad behaviors, it prompts them to reflect on their moral self,” Wang says. “It’s a simple but targeted way of changing behavior.”

Defining morality

Of course, not everyone agrees on what “moral” means. In a final study, 813 participants completed the same self-concept writing task from previous studies and then were asked if they would volunteer two minutes of their time to complete a survey to promote gender-neutral bathrooms.

They would receive no extra 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 bathrooms was moral or immoral.

The results were split along political lines. Liberal participants with high self-concept clarity were more likely to take the survey than liberal participants with low self-concept clarity. Yet self-concept clarity had no effect on conservative participants’ willingness to take the survey, since they generally “did not consider promoting these bathrooms to be a moral behavior to start with,” Wang said.

Knowing oneself can be difficult—especially during times of upheaval. But interventions in schools and workplaces that help people reflect on their values, goals, and meaning in their work could help, the researchers say. “It could go a long way in reducing incidences of unethical behavior and moral transgressions,” Touré-Tillery says. “And it’s a pretty straightforward exercise.”

And if there is a situation where the stakes—and the potential for cheating—are high, an honor pledge may make a real difference in outcomes.

“If you can remind people about their moral standards and the implications of their behaviors, it could really deter immoral behavior,” Wang says.