The Influence Of Specific Positive Emotion On Decision In Moral Dilemma

Evidence from Economic and Behavioral science has shown that human beings are emotional arid sometimes made decision that seems irrational, rather than always following the rule of rational economic participant assumption. When making moral decision, decision maker is also affected by emotion and cognition process in the mean time. What will they choose when they face difficult moral dilemma but in specific positive emotion status?In this research, we use video watching and story recalling in one’s own life to induce elevation, gratitude and amusement for different groups of participants, what’s more, they need to write down the story after recalling. We would like to focus on the influence of specific positive emotion on moral decision in different moral dilemmas and hope specific moral emotion could play a positive role in educating citizens and better helping to maintain a harmonious society.In the first research,20participants evaluate the induction intensity and emotional experience of three kinds of emotion by using subjective assessment. In the second research, we randomly divided24participants into three emotion induction group and using Biotrace machine to observe their physiological change while induce specific positive emotion. In the manipulation check of emotion induction, we use two ways including self-rating for the physiological arousal and emotion experience, and also the Biotrace machine to gather physiological data like skin conductance, respiration, heart rate variability. It shows that the inducement of elevation is good but the effect and arousal intensity of gratitude is week.In the third research, we invited90participants and induce elevation, gratitude and amusement randomly before they finished the moral personal and moral impersonal moral dilemma. After analyzing the influence of emotion and moral dilemma situation on moral decision making, we found that:(1)there’s interaction effect of emotion and moral dilemma situation, although participants tend to make utilitarian moral decision, elevation could help to reduce this tendency compared with gratitude and make decision more neutral;(2)when considering moral impersonal situation, all emotion group tend to make non-utilitarian decision;(3)similar with classic Footbridge dilemma and Trolley dilemma, participants showed greater tendency to make utilitarian decision in incidental moral dilemma compared with instrumental moral dilemma, and it doesn’t vary within emotion group;(4)in instrumental moral dilemma, compared with gratitude, elevation and amusement group tend to make non-utilitarian decision.And the results of the influence of emotion and moral dilemma situation on reaction time showed that (1) participants took longer time in moral impersonal dilemma;(2)elevation could help shorten the reaction time;(3) participants took longer time to make utilitarian moral decision, which shows the dual process and conflict of emotion and cognition. Lastly, we didn’t find the moderating effect of social value orientation in the influence of emotion on moral dilemmas.Results showed that, as a specific positive emotion, elevation could shorter decision time and improve efficiency, what’s more, compared with gratitude, elevation and amusement could help decision maker to reduce tendency of making utilitarian moral decisions.