The Effects Of Psychological Distance And Protected Values On Moral Judgment And Decision-making

This study mainly discussed the impact of individual moral judgment and decision-making from two perspectives: psychological distance and protected values.The psychological distance was based on the Construal Level Theory.In the current social psychology research,CLT was a macro theory,and often used to analyze the behavior of consumers,as well as the governments' decision-making and other fields.But the study of the relationship between the CLT and moral decision-making was still in the development stage.The current research results that the role of psychological distance playing in the individual moral judgments and decision-making behavior were not consistent,and even had a contradiction among them.This study attempted to explore the relationship between CLT and moral decision by manipulating psychological distance directly and made a more reasonable explanation of the existing inconsistent researches.After reading a large number of the literature,found that this inconsistent results might be related to differences in moral context and to the noble behavioral motives of the individual,for example,to protect more rare species.In the existing researches that from the perspective of protected values explored its' impact on decision-making,there was still little.Thus,this study differed from previous studies by:(1)controlling the individual emotions generated by controlling the abstract(concrete)degree of the description of the moral context;(2)describing the impacts of protected values and psychological distance on moral decision-making in the specific case;(3)The moral situation of this study mainly involved the different levels of values,through the bias of behavior to explore whether there were differences between the situation.This study consists of three experiments:(1)Pre-experiment.In order to test,under well-cognition,whether there was a significant difference in individuals' moral judgment and decision-making between abstract and concrete of behavior description of violation of moral principles.The results showed that there was a significant difference between them.(2)Experiment 1.To explore the impact of psychological distance and protected values on the bias of moral decision-making.The experimentwas conducted by manipulating the psychological design of psychological distance 2(near VS.far)� 2 protected values(high VS.low).The results showed that there was interaction between the them,that is,the closer the psychological distance,the lower the protected values,was more incline to utilitarian;farther away the psychological distance,the higher the value of protection is more inclined to deontology.Further analysis showed that individuals with low protected values were more likely to be affected by psychological distance,the closer the psychological distance was,the more vulnerable to the protection of the value of the impact.(3)Experiment 2.The effects of time distance,social distance and protected values on moral decision-making at different levels.In this experiment,2 � 2 � 3 mixed research design was designed,the results found that there was a significant interaction between time distance,social distance and three differences moral situations.