Taste And Moral Judgment:the Role Of Emotion And Self-Concept

Moral judgment is a common phenomenon in people’s lives, and has rich cultural connotations. Studies have found that the level of moral judgment is related with taste sense. For example, compared with tasting sweet food or tasteless water, subjects who tasted bitter food made the moral judgment of unethical behavior more severe (Eskine, Kacinik,&Prinz,2011); after tasting sweet food, people showed a higher tendency of helping others and more altruistic behavior (Meier, Moeller, Miles,&Robinson,2012). In other words, the conditions of embodied experience or feeling will temporarily change people’s original principles or beliefs, and result in moral judgment. This embodied exercise experience or status along with the psychological process of moral awareness and judgment embedded in each other and influenced each other, which called embodied moral judgment.In the Chinese culture, food culture is distinctive, and plays an important role. Then, can taste affect people’s moral judgment? If moral judgment is rooted in embodied experience, then what is the psychological mechanisms of embodied moral judgment? We focused on the following three issues and carried out three experimental studies:(1) Dose the taste effect of moral judgment also exist in the Chinese cultural context?(2) Is the taste effect of moral judgment due to the emotional experience which brought by taste? That is, when tasting the bitter food, people will get a very uncomfortable feeling, and result in a harsh judgment for unethical behavior. When tasting sweet food, the feeling is very good, so people judge the ethical behavior more moral.(3) If the taste experience has possibility to change the individual’s self-concept, and will it affect the moral judgment? That is, tasting the bitter foods, people’s self-concept level becomes low, thus they make more severe judgment of unethical behavior. Tasting the sweet foods, people’s self-concept level becomes high, thus they make a more tolerant judge for moral behavior.The results show that:(1) The judgments on the ethical behavior have not significant difference in two taste (sweet/bitter) conditions (p>0.05), and the judgments on unethical behavior have not significant difference yet (p>0.05); the likeability of taste can significantly predict the judgment of ethical behavior (p<0.05), but can not predict the judgment of unethical behavior (p>0.05). So, the sense of taste does not affect the moral judgment, but the likeability of the sweet and bitter taste can predict the judgment of ethical behavior rather than immoral behavior.(2) The pleasure and arousal before and after the sweet experience has significant differences (p<0.05); before and after the bitter experience, the pleasure wakes a sense of no significant difference (p>0.05). In the taste conditions of sweet and bitter, the pleasure exists a significant difference between subjects (p<0.05), but the arousal is not significantly different (p>0.05); Subjects’ taste effect is not significant on judging ethical behavior and unethical behavior (p>0.05), the pleasure can be significant to predict the judgment of moral behavior (p<0.05), but not significantly with the immoral behavior to judge (p>0.05). That is, the factors influenced the judgment of ethical behavior is not of taste itself, but the pleasure brought about taste. Taste and pleasure do not affect the judgment of unethical behavior(3) In the conditions of sweet and bitter taste, the subjects’self-concept differences are not significant (p>0.05); the taste and self-concept respectively have not a significant predictive effect on moral judgment (p>0.05), the sense of taste with the self-concept have significant effect on the judgment of ethical behavior (p<0.05). That is, taste can not affect the moral judgment, but collaborating the self-concept make effect on the judgment of ethical behavior, and make no effect on the judgment of unethical behavior.