Effect Of Psychological Distance On Moral Judgment

People have to make many judgments in daily life, which one of very important aspects is moral judgment. Morality is a set of action principles, which are identified and obeyed by almost all the people in a society. Maybe, there are different moral principles from one society to another, but it also has the same one. From the perspective of social intuitionist model, moral judgments are usually made by the rapid moral intuitive rules. There may be a series of rational reasoning when it really need. From the approach of cognitive economy, people tend to apply the moral rules to make moral judgments directly. But do we apply these rules always on the same level?For example, do we always make the same level of judgment on the one moral transgression? It has discussed from the perspective of psychological distance.This research is based on a study of Eyal(2008), which discuss the impact of psychological distance on moral judgment on the background of China. Especially, the research discusses the moral transgression only, which is one aspect of morality. At first, the research discusses the characteristics of mental representation for moral transgression, and then investigates the effect of psychological distance on moral judgment. The subjects of the research are college students, and there are two studies, which has two secondary studies in each one. It exams if the characteristics of mental representation for moral transgression conformed the construal level theory, and the two secondary studies investigate the effect of temporal distance and space distance on mental representation for moral transgression separately. On the base of study 1,study 2 discusses impact of psychological distance on the tendency of judgment for the moral transgression, which has included some situational details that could moderate the offensiveness of the action. Also, the two secondary studies exam the hypothesis from temporal distance and space distance separately. Mainly draws the conclusion below after the research:(1)The mental representation of moral transgression conform the construal level theory. People are more likely to describe morally charged actions in terms of abstract moral values rather than in terms of more concrete incidental terms when the actions are psychologically distant than psychologically distant.(2) When there are some situational details that could moderate the offensiveness of the morally charged actions, people could tend to make moral judgment more harshly in distant psychological distance than in proximal psychological distance.