The relationship of moral judgment, self-awareness, and sex to complicance behavior

Abstract

Sixty male and sixty female college students, representing three of Kohlberg's stages of moral judgment, were exposed to a complicance situation in which their personal count of a series of metronome clicks was contradicted by a unanimous group. Group differences were either one or two steps from veridical. For half of the subjects self-awareness was experimentally increased. The results indicated that subjects in moral judgment Stages 3 and 4 complied significantly more than Stage 5 subjects. The self-awareness manipulation produced a complex pattern of results in the form of a three way interaction with moral judgment and type of compliance. Finally, sex differences in compliance behavior were significant, with females complying more than males. The results were discussed in terms of a cognition-behavior relationship.