The purposes of this study were to 1) explore the effect of parental overprotection on high school students' moral behavior, and 2) test effectiveness of priming messages which invokes morality, in order to result in their moral behaviors as well.
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The purposes of this study were to 1) explore the effect of parental overprotection on high school students' moral behavior, and 2) test effectiveness of priming messages which invokes morality, in order to result in their moral behaviors as well.
A total of 1,035 high-school students in Gyung-gi province were participated in the initial survey measuring parental overprotection by using Korean-Parental Overprotection Scale(K-POS). Based on the responses, we selected 33 students who marked over +1.5 standard deviation of K-POS sum score as an ‘overprotected’ group, as well as other 33 students marked on average score was assigned to a ‘non-overprotected’ group. Among them, 49 students could participate in our behavioral experiments. The collected data from students who could not fully understand the instructions and missing data were removed, retaining the final data from 39 students (overprotected: 17, non-overprotected: 22).
The experiment was that participants should inform the number of coins in a picture to their assigned partner with given instructions: the number should be accurate, however, the more accurate number of coins, the less profit to participants since their reward was the discrepancy between the real number of coins and reported number of coins from their partner. That is, the experiment was imposing the situation of COI (conflict of interest) between public requirement (instructions) and private profits (rewards), in order to compare the degree of moral behavior between groups.
The results of the study is as follows: First, overprotected group showed significantly higher private-profit following behaviors, meaning that parental overprotection negatively affects moral children’s moral behaviors. Second, after priming message of moral behaviors, private-profit following behaviors of overprotected group significantly decreased, implying the message effectively invoked their moral behaviors.
In the remaining part of the paper, more implications, limitations and future work were discussed.
Keywords: parental overprotection, morality, moral behavior, priming morality, COI(Conflict of Interest), private-profit following behavior, high-school student