The Effect Of Disgust And Construal Levels On College Students’ Moral Judgment

During the process of moral judgment, the question that in which way intuitional emotion and cognitive reasoning work on moral judgment has always been the debating topic among moral psychologists. This thesis briefly reviewed relevant theories about moral judgment. Besides the theories on cognitive moral development of Piegt and Kolberg, Haidt’s social intuition theory, Greene’s dual process assumption and Hauser’s moral grammar theory were also introduced, all of which regards emotion or mood as an essential variable while making moral judgment. Especially, disgust and empathy, as core emotions which influence moral judgment, were justified respectively by lots of empirical researches using different methods and designs. However, few researches on examining the effect of combination of disgust and empathy on moral judgment have been carried out so far. Therefore, this would be a new studying perspective that whether and how both emotion simultaneous presence wields influence on moral judgment, which is also worthwhile for us to looking into. Besides, given that the complex and puzzling relationship between cognition and emotion on moral judgment, their functioning system was explored from a integral point in this thesis. So construal level---one dimensions of cognition’s, were also included in this study. By designing contexts of co-existence of empathy and disgust, as well as of empathy and construal level, certain working principles on moral judgment were examined and observed.Previous researches have showed disgust feelings may lead subjects to make an extreme judgment when confronted with moral transgression behavior. The same case also happened on individuals who experienced the priming task of high construal level. Some researches came into the contrary conclusion. So it is necessary to testify and examine the result respectively in study1and study2.Study3discussed that the effects on moral judgment in moral dilemmas from co-existence of empathy and disgust. Whether both of them had the same directional influence on moral judgment were examined by inducing the two emotions. Besides, a procedure of ineffectual disgust mood was designed in study I to explore whether active cognition control had some impact on moral judgment.In study4, two kinds construal levels’(high vs low) effects on moral judgment were explored under the interference of two empathy levels (high vs low), which was meat to further discover that whether difference existed between high construal level and low construal level.According to the results of four studies, some conclusions were listed in the following:1.Disgust led people to make more severe judgments on moral transgression behavior, and this result was consistent with previous researches. Compared with low construal level, subjects under high construal level made more severe judgments confronted with moral violation, and Eytel etc.(2008) research was verified.2. In moral dilemmas, disgust feelings affect the results of moral judgment in the same way as empathy did. Compared with low empathy task, subjects from high empathy task tended to make more deontological judgments within no disgust mood induction group. Subjects made more utilitarian judgments on both high and low empathy tasks in the ineffectual disgust mood induction group, and significant difference showed when compared with the two other groups. This also suggested that active cognition control could help suppress the effects on moral judgment from emotions and lead subjects to take deliberation reasoning with more utilitarian judgments.3. High construal level leaded subjects to make more utilitarian judgments on both high and low empathy task, and significant difference exited compared with low construal level group. The result indicated that subjects of high construal level may exclude the contextual information to make an objective utilitarian judgment as a result of future psychological distance, which was exactly contrary to subjects of low construal level.4. Because of extreme significance on construal levels compared to on sympathy levels, it could be reasonable to claim that construal level manipulation effect was more powerful than empathy. Based on the fact that the mean of low empathy task scores was lower than it of high empathy task, it suggested that some consistency existed between high empathy level and low construal level on their effects on moral judgment’s tendency (leading to more deontological judgments).