RETRACTED: The Moral Virtue of Authenticity: How Inauthenticity Produces Feelings of Immorality and Impurity
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Post-publication record
- Nature
- Retraction
- Reason
- Concerns/Issues about Data;Investigation by Company/Institution;Investigation by Third Party;Original Data and/or Images not Provided and/or not Available;Unreliable Results and/or Conclusions;
- Date
- 7/6/2023 0:00
- Flagged by OpenAlex?
- Yes
Source: Retraction Watch, joined by DOI. OpenAlex records retraction as is_retracted, a boolean over a state space with at least four values, so it cannot express an expression of concern, a correction or a reinstatement — it reports them as false, which reads as “fine”.
Abstract
The five experiments reported here demonstrate that authenticity is directly linked to morality. We found that experiencing inauthenticity, compared with authenticity, consistently led participants to feel more immoral and impure. This link from inauthenticity to feeling immoral produced an increased desire among participants to cleanse themselves and to engage in moral compensation by behaving prosocially. We established the role that impurity played in these effects through mediation and moderation. We found that inauthenticity-induced cleansing and compensatory helping were driven by heightened feelings of impurity rather than by the psychological discomfort of dissonance. Similarly, physically cleansing oneself eliminated the relationship between inauthenticity and prosocial compensation. Finally, we obtained additional evidence for discriminant validity: The observed effects on desire for cleansing were not driven by general negative experiences (i.e., failing a test) but were unique to experiences of inauthenticity. Our results establish that authenticity is a moral state--that being true to thine own self is experienced as a form of virtue.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- Psychological Science
- Topic
- Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
- Field
- Neuroscience
- Canadian institutions
- Kellogg's (Canada)
- Funders
- —
- Keywords
- VirtueMoralityImmoralityPsychologySocial psychologyFeelingCompensation (psychology)Prosocial behaviorMediationModerationAffectionEpistemologyPhilosophyLawPolitical science
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes