| Traditional research in moral psychology has investigated participants' narrative responses to scenarios involving moral decisions, and their justifications for those responses. More recently, researchers have advocated using approaches from social cognitive research to investigate the underlying judgment processes involved in making moral decisions and attributions. Some findings, however, suggest that moral decision-making may be qualitatively different from other social attributions. The present work contributes to a moral psychology research program examining such issues. Three studies applied existing social cognitive paradigms---cognitive busyness and mood induction---to investigate the moral attribution process. Two studies found little effect of cognitive load on perceivers' attributions of a target actor's morality, in particular in their ability to incorporate situational factors to adjust initial, automatic judgments. In Study 2, however, load was found to exacerbate judgments of moral acts, making ratings more lnoral; this effect was smaller for immoral acts. Study 3 found that positive mood acted in a similar way to load in Study 2, suggesting a similarity between the effects of mood and cognitive busyness. Overall, results were too inconclusive to make claims about the identity of moral and other social attributions, and further clarifying research is discussed. Finally, practical application of moral attribution research (such as to the legal system) is addressed. |
