The Relationship between Moral Behavior and Identity: Mediating Role of Psychological and Situational Benefit

The purpose of this study was to explain the relationship between moral behavior and identity of high school students by the mediating role of psychological and situational benefit.

The research method was descriptive-correlational. The sample size included 907 (393 girls and 514 boys) high school students in the city of Hamedan who were selected by multi-stage cluster random sampling, and answered the Moral Behavior (Delfan Biranvand and Rashid, 1400), Moral Identity (Aquino and Reed, 2002), and the Benefit (Delfan Biranvand  and Rashid, 1400) questionaries. Data were analyzed by structural equation modeling using Lisrel-8.8.

The results showed that psychological and situational benefit play a significant mediating role in the relationship between moral behavior and identity.

Based on the results of the present study, it can be said that psychological and situational benefit can be explained as good factors for explaining the reason for the individuals’ moral behaviors. Because evaluating how beneficial moral behaviors, such as honesty, can motivate individual to show the right behaviors.