The Private and Public Moral Self

According to Baumeister, the heart of the self is reflexive consciousness (Baumeister 2010, p. 142).  The object of this reflection, however, is somewhat mysterious.  Who we are and what we will do is not a given. We learn about ourselves by observing past and current behaviors and making predictions  (Baumeister 2010, p. 142). However, only a few of these beliefs about the self “are active in focal awareness at any given time” (Baumeister 2010, p. 145).  The presence of specific beliefs in focal awareness is moderated both by internal processes such as self-regulation (Baumeister, 2010, p. 143) and the extent to which awareness is focused on the self to the exclusion of other objects of awareness (Baumeister, 2010, p. 143).  For example, as Duval and Wicklund found in 1972 attitude “self-reports filled out in front of a mirror are more accurate (in the sense that they better predict subsequent behavior) than those filled out with no mirror present” (as cited in Baumeister, 2010, p. 143).

Self-awareness can bring ongoing mental processes into the forefront of consciousness, intensifying, as Scheier and Carver found in 1977, either awareness of emotional reactions or emotional reactions themselves (as cited in Baumeister, 2010, p. 143).  Increased self-awareness is also positively correlated to successful self-regulation (Baumeister, 2010, p.  143).  However, if individuals are engaged in behaviors that are at odds with their self-concept, self-awareness may be avoided (Baumeister, 2010, p. 144) often through effortful and biased self-justification and selective recall.   

The self, then, is, can be acted upon.  Rather than being a given, it is a flexible store of self-knowledge of varying degrees of accuracy and subject to revision or minimization in a variety of situations, social and non-social.  For humans, at least, social situations predominate, and, Baumeister writes, “[t]he first job of the self is to garner social acceptance” (as cited in Baumeister & Finkel 2010, p. 140).  Social acceptance requires “self-understanding on things that connect [the self] to other people, including family, groups, country, and other relationships” (Baumeister, 2010, p. 140).  When the self identifies with each of these categories, relationships and roles are made salient (Baumeister, 2010, p. 140). At another level of identification, the individual may look to the group in order to learn about herself.  Not only must an individual seeking greater status or seeking to maintain status within the group understand the standards against which she is being judged but she must further internalize these standards so that self-monitoring proceeds automatically (Baumeister, 2010, p. 140).  

People effortfully defend their private moral self-concept. As Haidt and Kesbir (2009) argue, "[w]hen people behave selfishly, they judge their own behavior to be more virtuous than when they watch the same behavior performed by another person." However, this pattern is not exhibited when participants are under cognitive load, suggesting that individual reappraisal of selfish action as virtuous is effortful and deliberate. 

The presence of an audience, however, does increase prosocial behavior (Baumeister, 1982). Even the presence of security cameras, acting, perhaps, like the mirror in Duval and Wicklund (1972), increased helping behaviors (Van Rompay, Vonk, & Fransen, in press, cited in Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). Indeed, if participants play a dictator game on a computer that has been given "stylized eyespots on the desktop background" they will give more generously (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). 

Curiously, when the audience can be deceived, individuals will often fall back on behaviors that are selfish, not prosocial, and dishonest. For example, Batson, Thompson, Seuferling, Whitney, &  Strongman (1999) "asked participants to decide how to assign two tasks to themselves and another participant. One of the tasks was much more desirable than the other, and participants were given a coin to flip, in a sealed plastic bag, as an optional decision aid. Those who did not open the bag assigned themselves the more desirable task 80-90% of the time. But the same was true of participants who opened the bag and (presumably) flipped the coin. Those who flipped may well have believed, before the coin landed, that they were honest people who would honor the coin’s decision: A self-report measure of moral responsibility, filled out weeks earlier, correlated with the decision to open the bag, yet it did not correlate with the decision about task assignment" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009).

Privacy, then, can reduce the incidence of prosocial behaviors, even when these behaviors are supported by strong cultural mandates. In Japan, for example, "when participants are placed in lab situations that lack the constant informal monitoring and sanctioning systems of real life, cooperation rates in small groups are low, even lower than those of Americans (Yamagishi, 2003)" (Haidt & Kesebir, 2009). It could be argued, however, that the social context of the laboratory would predictably be differently marked in context-sensitive collectivist cultures.