The Influence Of Emotional Background And Action Frame On Moral Judgment

The role of emotion in moral judgment has been drawn more and more attention. It has been shown that moral emotions induced by the moral context could affect people’s moral judgments on particular behaviors. In addition, emotion induced by external stimulus, even if having no direct relation with the moral context (the emotional context of a moral judgment), will impact people’s moral judgments. Previous studies have explained this phenomenon from different aspects. While judging a behavior, people often consider about different consequences of conducting a behavior and taking no action. In the field of moral psychology, this difference is called action frame of moral judgment. Different theories have distinctive predictions about the effect of emotional context on moral judgment based on the condition that people conduct nothing in a moral context. For this reason, we design two studies to explore the combined effect of emotional context and action frame on moral judgment.Study1uses2(Frame Types: active frame, passive frame; between-subjects factor)×2(Dilemma Types: trolley dilemma, footbridge dilemma; within-subjects factor) mixed design. Through different presentations of the questions of moral judgment, this study is aimed at exploring whether action frame could affect the moral judgment of different dilemmas in the absence of emotional context.Study2uses3(Emotional Context: positive emotion, negative emotion, neutral emotion; between-subjects factor)×2(Frame Type: active frame, passive frame; between-subjects factor) x2(Dilemma Type: trolley dilemma, footbridge dilemma; within-subjects factor) mixed design. By using films to arouse either positive or negative emotion, this study is aimed to investigate whether the emotional context could affect moral judgment, and whether this effect is the same under different types of action frame or emotion, compared with the neutral emotion group.The results show that:(1) Action frame modulates the effect of emotional context on moral judgment. In the absence of emotional context, action frame does not affect moral judgment. But the influence of emotional context on moral judment depends on action frame.(2) In active frame, compared with neutral emotion group or negative emotion group, subjects in positive emotion group have more moral utilitarian tendency; while in passive frame, utilitarian tendency of moral judgment decreases among groups, from positive emotion group to negative emotion group. (3) In active frame, emotional context will affect people’s choices in the footbridge dilemma. People with a positive emotion make a utilitarian choice easier than with negative emotion, but neither the positive emotion group nor negative emotion group is significantly different from the neutral emotion group. In passive frame, people’s choice is affected by neither the emotional context nor action frame. Neither the action frame nor emotional context has impact people’s choice pattern in trolley dilemma.