In this paper, we investigate whether and how morality irrelevant inspiration can influence consumer’s own morality behavior. Thrash & Elliot (2003) conceptualized inspiration as a psychological construct with three core characteristics: evocation, transcendence, and motivation. Morality behavior include prescriptive morality (e.g., prosocial behavior) and proscriptive morality (e.g., immoral behavior), which have different antecedents. We propose a common antecedent for both faces of morality and found that morality-irrelevant inspirational experiences (triggered by others or oneself) could decrease proscriptive morality and increase prescriptive morality, via emotional and cognitive transcendence. This is the first paper to explore the roles played by the emotional and cognitive transcendence resulted from the inspirational experiences and the consequences of transcendence on a source-irrelevant context.

• Jianping Liang(Sun Yat-sen University, China)
• Zengxiang Chen(Sun Yat-sen University, China)
• Jing Lei(The University of Melbourne, Australia)