The Effect of Unconscious Goals on Moral Orientation

It has been found that goals can be activated without awareness,and the goal pursuit can also operate beyond conscious awareness. However,the mechanism of this unconscious goal-directed behavior is still unclear. The present study investigated whether an unconscious goal could affect moral orientation. In Experiment 1,participants were primed (or not) with achievement goals by scrambled sentence test. Subsequently,they completed a questionnaire about their moral orientation. The results showed that the participants primed with unconscious achievement goal were more utilitarian. In contrast,Experiment 2 found that the activated mother relational schema led participants to prefer deontological behavior. These results suggested that automatic unconscious goals can adjust moral orientation in an intelligent way,which enables more adaptive goal pursuit behaviors.