Being Black-and-white:Visual Contrast Between Black And White Polarizes Moral Judgment

Moral judgment has been the core issue of moral psychology research. In the early days, Kohlberg’s moral research hypothesis has affected researches of moral judgment, proposing that the only factor that influence moral judement is moral reasoning (e.g., Kohlberg, Levine,& Hewer,1983), and the recent research on moral judgments are more focused on process of irrational, and regard it as moral consideration of important factor. Haidt (2001) social intuition, think individual moral judgment in machining process is carried out under the condition of the unconscious. This model is that moral judgment is a lawyer, rather than a scientist, because the individual is in the unconscious of moral judgment, then seek a reasonable explanation for their own judgment. Indeed, a growing number of studies have shown that moral aversion affects judgment (e.g., Eskine, Kacinik and Prinz,2011; Schnall, Haidt, Clore and Jordan,2008; Haidt, 2005). Schnall, Benton and Harvey (2008) exposed two groups of participants to different odors, compared individuals with no exposure to foul odour, individuals exposed to a bad odor environment judged moral violations, such as lying, stealing,to be more immoral. In addition, it has been shown that the embodied experience and moral experience involves similar brain structures (e.g., Moll, Oliveira-Souza, MollI et al.,2005). As a result, there are more and more evidence that affect such as aversion can change moral judgment.Though, there are plenty of emotion research supports the social intuition model, but the general claim, the intuition has influence to the moral judgment, has not been fully. From this perspective, Zarkadi and Schnall (2013) focused on accidental black-and-white visual cues can have effect on moral judgment. The study participants to present without any emotional valence of visual cues to explore the relationship between, found that black and white visual contrast polarization moral judgment.This research adopts the Zarkadi and Schnall (2013) experimental paradigm, continue to test black and white visual contrast to judge polarization effect, on the one hand, using different Zarkadi and Schnall (2013) use the moral judgment of material inspection, on the other hand, to investigate the effect of various factors on moral judgment mediation is also a research focused on moral judgment. Chiou and Cheng (2013) found that bright and will start the individual moral concept, thus affecting the individual moral behavior. On this basis, this study examines the moral highlight is black and white visual contrast intermediary factors of moral judgment.In order to more detailed studies on black and white visual contrast effect on moral judgment, and meantime the mediation effect of using general negative social issues of moral judgment, moral dilemma situation material, college students as subjects, design three experiments, research on revolves around the following questions:(1) by visual cues, the black and white visual contrast to what is the effect of moral judgment? (2) black and white visual contrast visual clues whether by activating moral subjects-unethical dual concept affect the moral judgment?Study the following conclusions:(1) black and white visual contrast polarization moral judgments, that is, black and white visual contrast background makes the individual will be judging negative social issues more immoral, behavior from the moral dilemma situation judgment more deviation from neutral judgment;(2) an individual’s right to unethical word classification correct discriminant slower than moral words, namely the individual existence of immoral attention bias.