Effects Of Observing Others’ Immoral Behaviors On Moral Decision–making

Moral decision–making involves the evaluation of actions that concern norms and values established in a social environment,determing following behaviors.As human beings live in quite a complex social environment,their moral decision–making should be influenced by many factors.According to Social Learning Theory(SLT),the current paper examined the effects of observing others’ different types of behaviors(moral/ neutral/ immoral)on moral decision–making.Moreover,based on Unconscious Thought Effect(UTE)and Kahneman’s dual–system theory,the current paper also examined the effects of different levels of consciousness(conscious/unconscious)and different types of decision–making(intuition/reasoning)on moral decision–making.Finally,we conducted experiment via Event Related Potential(ERP)to examine the neural mechanism underlying how moral decision–making are influenced by automatic and controlled processes when observing others’ different types of behaviors(moral/ neutral/ immoral).A total of 84 subjects from university students participated in the behavioral experiment,and 12 subjects from university students participated in the ERPs experiment.The results of behavioral experiment showed that:1)Observing others’ immoral behavior(compared with observing others’ neutral behavior)could significantly increase subjects’ immoral decision–making.However,observing others’ moral behavior(compared with observing others’ neutral behavior)could not increase subjects’ moral decision–making.These results indicate that the positive effects of others’ moral behavior on our own moral decision–making may be weak but the negative effects of others’ immoral behavior on our own moral decision–making may be strong.2)Moral decision–making is not significantly influenced by different types of decision–making(intuition/reasoning).3)Moral decision–making is not significantly influenced by different levels of consciousness(conscious/unconscious).4)There is a significant interaction effect of different types of decision–making(intuition/reasoning)and different levels consciousness(conscious/unconscious)on one’s own moral decision–making.To be specific,conscious condition combined with reasoning condition or unconscious condition combined with intuition condition,would lead subjects’ decision–making more moral.The results of ERPs experiment showed that:Observing others’ behaviors(moral/neutral/immoral)would mainly elicit N2,P300 and N400 ERP components.Different from the sources of N2 component that mainly localized in frontal cortex,the P300 and N400 components mainly activated areas in central brain regions and parietal lobes.We found significant differences in the brain activation between observing others’ immoral behaviors and neutral behaviors,but no differences were found between observing others’ moral behaviors and neutral behaviors.The results of ERP are in consistent with the results of behavioral experiment.These results suggest that people’s moral decision–making may be affected by others’ behaviors.However,such effects may be more sensitive to others’ immoral behaviors rather than that to others’ moral behavior.The current paper has some theoretical and practical contributions on adopting social learning theory to the field of moral decision–making.