The Impact Of Emotional Involvement On Moral Judgment

According to the dual-process theory of moral judgment (Greene et al., 2001), bothcognitive factor and emotional factor are the two important factors that affect moral judgment.In the classic trolley dilemma, people tend to sacrifice one people to save another five. In thissituation, people will weigh the loss– benefit analysis, and based on economic principles, thisjudgment is utilitarian judgment. However, we believe that the emotional factor is equallyimportant and complicated in the trolley dilemma, and people whose emotional involvement atdifferent levels will make different moral judgments in certain situations. Through controlingthe situation to induce different emotions involved, the author attempts to examine the impactof emotional conflict on moral judgment.This study includes three experiments. The author adapts the classical case of the trolleydilemma to control the subject's emotional involvement, so as to test subjects' moral judgment.The results showed that:1) In the trolley dilemma, the subject's emotional conflicts will become stronger withmore people in the fork, which will accordingly reverse the utilitarian moral judgment to thenon-utilitarian one.2) Not only the number of the people in the fork affects moral judgment, people's categoryin the fork can impact moral judgment. The critical point of the reverse moral response patternvaries with the different categories of people in the fork. When people are workmen, thecritical point is 3; when people are women, the critical point is 2; when the people are pregnant,the critical point is 1.3) When the person in the fork is pregnant which can arouse the subject's strong emotions,and the other emotional factors (for example, whether relatives or not) are not easy to have animpact on the moral judgment.