The Effects Of Cognitive Style,Decision Time On Moral Decision

In our daily life,morals are almost everywhere.Sociology,economics and other disciplines have shown great interest in morality and carried out a lot of research,while psychologists focus on how individuals make moral decisions.Early psychologists believed that moral decision is entirely for the reasoning and ignored the role of intuition.Later,emotion and intuition were introduced into the moral decision-making by Hadit.He also stressed the importance of intuition in moral decision-making.Until now,Greene proposed the dual-process model of moral theory from the previous experience and his own achievements in cognitive neuroscience.This further improved the study of moral decision-making.Researches showed that there are differences in individual moral decisions.Previous studies summarized a number of factors that affect moral decision-making,including emotional status,time distance,the type of moral dilemma,the atmosphere of the situation and so on.Cognitive styles as a typical way in the information processing,had also been the hot spots of the field of decision-making research.This paper is based on the dual-process model,explored whether the cognitive style will affect the individual's decision-making in moral dilemma.Meanwhile we also explored whether the cognitive style would affect the individual's decision-making in the conditions of time pressure and time affluence.This study consists of three experiments.In experiment 1,we examined whether different cognitive styles affected the preference of moral decision making.Experiment 1 was a 2(cognitive style: intuitive,rational)× 2(moral dilemmas: personal moral dilemma,impersonal moral dilemma)mix experimental design.Moral dilemma was a within-subjects variable,and cognitive style was between-subjects variable,The dependent variable was the choice in the moral dilemmas.On the base of experiment 1,experiment 2a further explored whether cognitive styles affected the moral decision-making of individuals in the condition of time pressure.Experiment 2b explored whether cognitive styles would affect the individual's decision-making in the condition of time affluence.The results showed that:(1)Individuals with different cognitive styles made different moral decision and had different decision time in the moral dilemmas.In the personal moral dilemma,individuals with rational cognitive style were more likely to make a decision of utilitarianism and spent more decision time,individuals with intuitive cognitive style were more inclined to make a decision of deontology and spent less decision time.(2)In the condition of time pressure,individuals preferred information processing of intuition and made more decisions of deontology compared to the normal time.(3)In the conditions of time affluence.Individuals didn't change their way of information processing.Therefore,there was no significant difference in the preference of moral decision-making between the different cognitive styles compared to normal time.