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The Motivation To Comply With Internal Or External Moral Expectations: Is Just One Motivation Enough?, Huey Woon Lee

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Although researchers have shown how the need to reduce internal discrepancies between one’s current level of morality and one’s moral standard and the need to reduce negative social judgment drive pro-social behaviors, it remains unclear if the presence of both these motivations has additive effects on pro-social behaviors. I propose that the answer is no: people operate on a sufficient motivation principle when deciding to behave prosocially, that is, they should be equally prosocial whether one or both motivations are present. I further argue that individual differences in public (PUSC) and private (PRSC) self-consciousness affect people’s attention to the two …