Document Type : Original Article
Researchers
1 student of allameh tabatabai university
2 allameh tabatabai university
Ministerial Ethics Committee
Lawyering, as central profession within the legal system, is accompanied by complex requirements of professional ethics. Lawyers must, while pursuing their clients’ interests, remain committed to principles such as honesty, independence, confidentiality, and social responsibility. The Code of Professional Conduct of the Bar Association likewise emphasizes independence, integrity, preservation of professional secrecy, and commitment to justice. Accordingly, understanding the psychological mechanisms that shape lawyers’ ethical behavior is important. Professional ethical judgment and decision making emerge from a dynamic interaction between individual factors, such as legal expertise, professional norms, and value orientations, and situational factors, including choice framing, institutional pressures, and role cues. Empirical evidence indicates that legal education and professional experience can both attenuate and amplify ethical biases. One particularly important situational mechanism is professional role activation, whereby reminders of legal responsibilities, role-based scenarios, or appeals to professional values make role-relevant norms more salient, increase cognitive accessibility to ethical standards, and thereby guide decision making. process is closely linked to professional identity, understood as set of internalized values and beliefs that transform the role of lawyer into an integral part of the self and orient ethical reasoning. Moral Foundations Theory further suggests that individuals rely on distinct moral foundations—such as care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty when making moral judgments, and that differences in how these foundations are weighted may shape lawyers’ responses to professional role priming. Despite these strong theoretical connections, few empirical studies have simultaneously examined professional role activation and moral foundations within samples of lawyers.