Research On The Effect Of Individual Construal Level And Emotion On Moral Judgment

Moral judgment is the evaluation of one's behaviors or characteristics.On the basis of moral judgment,there are Kohlberg's rational model,Haidt's social intuition model and Greene's dual-process theory model.The three theoretical models have different views on the issue how emotion the emotions and the cognition influence on moral judgment.The social intuition model and the dual processing theory model both consider that the moral judgment are related to the abstract moral principles,so that researchers introduced the construal level theory.They used the construal theory to further demonstrate the impact of abstract moral priciples on moral judgments.However,the result remained controversial.Based on the theory of dual-process theory,we argue that the inconsistent conclusion might be due to the fact that the participants' emotions elicited when reading the moral events might modulate moral judgments.The current study e�plored the influence of interpretation level and emotion on moral judgments of different violation moral events,and the underlying mechanisms.This study attempted to provide a reasonable explanation to the exist inconsistencies.We recruited college students as participants,and the study contains three e xperiments.In experiment 1,we adopted a questionnaire to examine the influence of spatial distance on the moral judgment.found that compared with the short spatial distance,the participants in the long spatial distance condition adopted a stricter moral criterion towards the low and moderate level violation events.But in the high violation group,there were no differences between the two spatial-distance groups.This result referred to the unique mechanism in the particular illegal level of the moral condition.In experiment 2 we used Behavior Identification Form(BIF)to distinguish the high construal level from low construal level.Participants of different groups then evaluated the acceptable level,emotional valence and emotional intensity of one moral event which was presented in a word-by-word way.The results shoved that the participants in the high construal level adopted a stricter moral criterion towards the events,compared with the low construal level and the reaction was also faster.However,the participants showed more negative emotions only in high degree of violation.In experiment 3,we used the emotional pictures to elicit the negative emotion before the moral judgment.The participants then rated the acceptable level of one moral event which was presented in a word-by-word way.The results showed that under the condition of negative emotion,the participants with high and low construal level have significant differences in the acceptance of low level violation,but the behavior of high violation was not significant in the level of interpretation.Combined with the results of experiment 2,there came to the conclusion that the participants in high construal level showed the more negative emotion when reading the high degree of violation,which influenced their moral judgments.