A Study Of The Influence Of Haptic Sensations On Moral Judgment

Nowadays, moral issues have become the focus of the field of psychology. Withthe growing numbers of research on embodied cognition，more and more researchersbegan to emphasize the critical role of human body and its sensory-motor system, andstudied the moral issues putting the embodied cognition first instead of thedisembodied cognition. Touch is both the first sense to develop and a critical means ofinformation acquisition and environmental manipulation. However, its impact onmoral judgment has gained little attention of us. Therefore, this study attempts toexplore the influence of the haptic sensations on moral judgments, taking theperspective of the embodied cognitive psychology.Embodied moral judgment studies have found that vision, odor and taste willaffect people’s moral judgments. In the current study, we investigated the sense oftouch and its impact on moral judgments and the mediating role of belief in a justworld. In the experiment, we put rough sand paper and smooth paper in the same sizeand same color separately on the table. Each participant was assigned randomly to oneof two conditions, in which they wrote on the margin of the questionnaire to fullytouch the rough or smooth paper, and then completed the questionnaire consisting ofthe manipulation check questions, the moral-judgment task and the belief in a justworld scale (in experiment2).Findings indicated that tactile experience influenced themoral judgments in that participants had stronger negative attitudes towards theimmoral events after writing on the rough paper, compared to the smooth papercondition. People’s belief in a just world, however, had no significant mediating effectin the link between rough experience and harm moral judgments.