"Love Well, Whip Well": The Effect Of Psychological Distance On Moral Judgment

Current research within the field of moral psychology has shown that moral situation influence people’s moral reasoning. For instance, factors such as the nature of the moral dilemma (Krebs, Denton, Wark, Couch, Racine & Krebs,2002), its surrounding context (Denton & Krebs, 1990), characteristics of the protagonist (McGillicuddy-De Lisi, Sullivan & Hughes,2003) have all been found to affect moral reasoning. The moral reasoning is closely related to moral judgment which is one of indispensable evaluative activities in human daily life. At present, some research of Construal level theory showing that, change the temporal or spatial context of a moral situation affect how it is perceived and subsequently judgment.Construal level theory (Trope & Liberman,2003) posits that psychological distance (e.g., temporal distance, spatial distance) affects how people mentally represent physical and social objects and events, and subsequently judgment. According to this theory, people are more likely to use more central, general, schematic, and decontextualized features to construe psychologically distant things, For psychologically near events and objects, people are more likely to use more peripheral, contextual, detailed and incidental features.In recent years, Construal level theory has received a great deal of attention in psychology, and its predictions have been applied to many aspects of human cognition and behavior (Trope& Liberman,2010). Psychological distance has been found to, for instance, affect person perception (Nussbaum, Trope, & Liberman,2003), self-control (Fujita, Trope, Liberman,& Levin-Sagi,2006), problem solving (Forster, Friedman, & Liberman,2004), and negotiation (Henderson, Trope,& Carnevale,2006).Extensive research have shown that psychological distance affect people’s moral judgments (Eyal, Liberman,& Trope,2008; Agerstrom & Bjorklund,2009a; 2009b; Gong & Medin,2012; Zezelj & Jokic,2014a; Gong, Iliev,& Sachdeva,2012), but the specific how to influence, so far has not been unified conclusion. Past research mainly respectively investigate the impact of one or a few dimension of psychological distance on moral judgment. Lammers (2012) investigate the effect of temporal distance and social distance on moral judgment, has shown that the interaction effect of temporal distance and social distance on moral judgment. Specifically, judgments of one’s own morality became less harsh with distance but that judgments of other actors became harsher with distance. No matter from the construal level theory, or psychological distance, this result provides new evidence for the study of moral judgment. This also makes us think, whether we can examine the effects of psychological distance on moral judgment basis on the research paradigm of Lammers (2012), and to further explore the interaction effect of multiple dimensions of psychological distance on moral judgment?Therefore, in order to investigate the effect of psychological distance on moral judgment, and the mediator effect, the current research designed 3 experiments. We would use abstract and concrete paradigm to manipulate temporal distance and spatial distance, a general situation and moral dilemma situation as the materials of moral judgment, Chinese college students as subjects, to study the following questions:(1) What was the effect of psychological distance on the mental representation? Is in line with the construal level theory? (2) What was the effect of psychological distance on moral sensitivity and distance perception? (3) What was the effect of psychological distance on moral judgment? Whether people judge immoral acts as more offensive when the acts are psychologically distant than near? (4) Whether psychological distance affect the moral judgment through other factors? If any, was moral sensitivity or distance perception, or other?By the results of three experiments, the current research got the following conclusions:(1) The mental representation of unethical behavior conform the construal level theory. Specifically, in the proximal psychological distance condition, people tend to construe unethical behavior at low level; and in distant psychological distance condition, people are more likely to construe unethical behavior at high level.(2) Have the interaction effect of temporal and spatial distance on moral judgment. In the near future, when the event happened in a proximity place, people’s moral judgments are more strictly.(3) The psychological distance influence moral judgment. Compared to the distant psychological distance, in proximal psychological distance, people tend to make moral judgment more harshly.