Moral High-ground:The Effects Of High And Low Position On Moral Judgment And Moral Behavior

"High/up" usually represents the high status and good quality,while "low/down" stands for low status and poor quality.Such rhetoric is called "metaphor" in linguistics,which is also a cognitive tool that people use to understand the abstract concepts in the life(Landau,Meier,&Keefer,2010).Metaphor has a wide range of influence in perception,attention,memory,and other cognitive areas,and it has been under the spotlight in moral psychology researches.For example,there are widespread colloquialisms about "moral high-ground" or "higher virtues" to describe a moral person and "low dirty" or "inferior low" to describe an immoral person.The vertical spatial metaphor of moral concepts,which is the association between high/up and moral(and low/down and immoral),has also been supported by an empirical research.In the study of Meier,Sellbom and Wygant(2007),it was found that moral concepts were encoded faster when presented in a high vertical location,and immoral concepts were encoded faster when appeared at the low space.However,some of the studies conducted by the experiment paradigm did not get a consistent result.Based on the existing research,this paper further validates the vertical spatial metaphor of moral concepts of high/up for morality and low/down for immorality under the background of Chinese culture.High/up or low/down appears as a metaphor for good or bad across many cultures.For example,associations between up and good(down and bad)can be seen in ideas about God or heaven above,and photographs of others were judged to have stronger beliefs in god,when positioned high on computer screens(Meier et al.,2007).The difference between high and low position may also affect people's moral judgment and moral behavior in moral field.Three studies investigated the vertical spatial metaphor of moral concepts and the effects of vertical spatial position on moral judgment and moral behavior.Study 1 was to further test the vertical spatial metaphor of moral concepts with reference to and improve the research of Meier,Sellbom and Wygant(2007).Study 2 employed a picture priming task to explore the impact of high and low position on moral judgment and moral behavior intention.Study 3 was to test the impact of high and low position on moral behavior by embodiment,and to explore the mediator variable between them.These studies drew the following conclusions:(1)The moral concept is represented by vertical spatial metaphor,which shows a metaphor consistency effects.The participants respond more quickly to the moral words in the high vertical position or encode faster to the immoral words in the low vertical position.(2)Participants who are in the high position make a severe moral judgment on immoral behavior issues,while in the low position the participants can in turn license harsher moral judgment on moral behavior issues,indicating reversed polarization of moral judgments.(3)The vertical spatial position affects the moral behavior,i.e.the participants located in the high position are more likely to act ethically than the ones stood in low position.(4)The study has found the mediator effect of emotion between the vertical spatial position and moral behavior.