How to capture moral behaviors: From laboratory to everyday life

Morality is an eternal topic that has been contemplated and pursued by both philosophers and lay people alike for thousands of years. Psychologists have found that individuals' moral judgments, moral emotions, moral intentions, moral motivations, moral reasoning and moral behaviors are not internally consistent. Among these, moral behavior is most relevant to everyday life. Given that moral behaviors are influenced by various factors such as personality traits (e.g., virtue), social situations (e.g., time pressure), and social desirability (e.g., moral image), it is quite challenging to effectively and accurately measure moral behaviors both in the laboratory and in real-life social situations. Our current work synthesizes differing concepts of moral behaviors and their conceptual distinctions from diverse disciplinary perspectives. We then offer a selective review on differing paradigms such as scale method, laboratory experiment, virtual reality, field experiment, big data approaches and experience-sampling method. It is our hope that this work would inspire researchers to better capture and explore the complex and dynamic moral behaviors, and provide potential future prospects to the emerging trends of novel thoughts, theories, methods, paradigms and applications for unveiling moral behaviors and their underlying processes.