ABSTRACT
People’s moral identities can be damaged or threatened easily. When their moral identity has been threatened, people are quick to seize upon moral opportunities as a means of countering the threat. People’s eagerness to find a moral opportunity when their identity has been challenged not only makes them vigilant for such situations, but imbues them with the motivation to see those situations available to them as moral opportunities. In addition to constituting failed identity tests that prompt them to take reparative steps, people’s past actions can also form the groundwork for future identity tests. Actions create the latter when they represent a claim by a person that can be undermined if the person does not take consistent actions in the future. It is also the case that saying no to an initial unreasonable request can sometimes increase the likelihood that a second more reasonable request will be complied with because the second request represents a test of the person’s initial claim about the identity irrelevance of the earlier refusal.
