Moderation Of The Doctrine Of The Mean: From Conceptual Representation To Sexuality Measurement

Since the zhongyong action deliberation system developed by C. F. Yang, the investigators have been working on exploring the conceptual structure of zhongyong and the measurement tools. Based on the Yang’s system, this research attempted to explore the psychological structure of zhongyong account of its original meaning with respect to the traditional ideas. At the same time, the experimental method was used to study participants’ implicit attitude and explicit attitude on zhongyong. The zhongyong thinking mode whether or not had an influence on FOK judgment was also considered.This research included four major studies. ⑴ The first one aimed to explore the psychological structure of Zhongyong using the method of free associations. According to the Spreading Activation Model, the Zhongyong word was presented as a stimulus to which 260 college students were asked to respond with at least 15 words that came to mind. Then 76 Zhongyong related words/ phrases were collected as units of analysis. ⑵ Research two was the development of Zhongyong Explicit Attitude Scale. It’s mainly for researching the participants’ explicit attitude of zhongyong. On the basis of the results of item analysis, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, the formal scale was developed. ⑶ Research three was using the experimental method to study the subjects’ implicit attitude and explicit attitude on zhongyong, and the relationship between them was also studied. The research tools in this stage were the Zhongyong Explicit Attitude Scale which measured the explicit attitude and the ST-IAT(Single Target Implicit Association Test)which measured the implicit attitude. ⑷ The last research was aiming to study wether the implicit attitude on zhongyong had any influence on the FOK judgment. The classical paradigm called RJR(Recall-Judgment-Recognition) was adopted. According to the D scores in ST-IAT, a high score group and a low score group were selected, 22 subjects in each group.Through statistical analysis, the following results can be concluded:(1) The psychological structure of Zhongyong was categorized into four different parts: collective-cultural thinking level, individual psychological thinking level, cognitive evaluation and personality characteristic. Further, the four general categories were fall into two main aspects that one is cultural thinking and the other is personality and evaluation. Individual psychological thinking level and personality characteristic belonged to the individual psychology, and collective-cultural thinking level was the social background which the human beings lived in. Cognitive evaluation was the bridge between the intrapersonal and interpersonal. The four general categories embodied the harmony of individual and collectivity as well as the intrapersonal and interpersonal harmony.(2) As from different angles, C. F. Yang’s Zhongyong Conceptualization Map, which paid particular emphasis on “action-deliberation” from the professional view, and the Map of Zhongyong Psychological Structure, which stressed on analyzing the psychological structure, were no difference in action-deliberation and differed from the personality characteristics and evaluation. There were both similarities and differences between the two.(3) The Zhongyong Explicit Attitude Scale was composed of three main factors including 17 items. We formed the formal scale by item-ananlyzing, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Item-analyzing showed that the correlation coefficients between each item score and the total score were in 0.352-0.699, which proposed that the scale had satisfactory item discrimination. Exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to amend and adjust the scale’s structure. Finally, the 17 items contained in the pretest were broken into three factors: positive attitude, negative attitude and neutral attitude. The reliability of the formal scale was evaluated by the Cronbach’s Alpha coefficient, which was 0.866, showing that the scale was suitable for collective measurement. The higher score was, the higher positive tendency on zhongyong.(4) Compared with the common sense that people tended to evaluate zhongyong with negative description in reality, the result of our measurement with the Zhongyong Explicit Attitude Scale showed that the subjects were a positive attitude to zhongyong. Girls had higher average score than boys, which reached significant level.(5) In the measurement of explicit attitude and implicit attitude, the score of the scale and the D scores both showed that the subjects were a positive attitude to zhongyong. But the correlation coefficient between explicit attitude and implicit attitude, which was called IEC, was very low. The low IEC declared that people could have dual attitudes, which were different evaluations of the same attitude object, and the explicit attitude differed from the implicit attitude in mental structure. The result was in favor of the dual-attitude model.(6) Compared with the traditional concept of mediation response, both high score group and low score group made an evaluation on both ends of the extremum and the median. The rank of FOK judgment between two groups was different, which reached the significant level.(7) Zhongyong thinking mode as the action deliberation system of meta-cognition had no influence on the rank and accuracy of FOK judgment, which was one of the most representative meta-cognitive monitoring, as well as the recalling accuracy, the recognition accuracy and generation mechanism. What’s more, both two groups supported the target-retrievability heuristic.