The Impact Of Perceived Harm On Moral Judgment

The asumption of the Moral Dyadic Theories about the role of perceived harm in moral judgment has been widely verified by studies in the western cultural.A large number of studies show that perceived harm,rather than emotion,is the fundamental psychological factor of moral judgment(Schein et al.,2017).Moreover,the researchers believe that this theory has cross-cultural adaptability.However,there are moral psychologists based on cultural diversity point of view believe that harm as the core of moral psychology theory only applies to the western cultural,do not reflect the collectivism cultures' moral values and moral judgments,for example,a study showed that Chinese culture focus on “civilized” rather than “harm” as their moral concern(Buchtel et al.,2015),thus,they argue that harm has been much exaggerated by the western researchers and a unity and common mechanism of moral judgment is probably does not exist.In addition,the Moral Foundation Theory declared that the five basic moral foundation constitute the unique moral cognition and mechanism in different cultures.At present,the effect of perceived harm on moral judgment under Chinese cultural background is still to be tested,and the mechanism of moral judgment needs further investigation.At the same time,some researchers have pointed out(Schein,2016)that the nature of perceived harm(such as the influence of moral patient identity on perceived harm)needs to be further explored.The Theory of Dyadic Morality has made an in-depth study of emotion and moral judgment,and the results showed that perceived harm rather than emotion is an important factor of moral judgment,which shows the unstable role of emotion in moral judgment.The research of evolutionary psychology showed(Mikhail,2007)that it was human nature to perceive potential or existing harm,and people had the need to avoid physical,psychological and social harm(Zhang B R,2012).So how do people avoid harm and what is the relationship between the need for harm avoidance to moral judgment? This study compares the effects of the values of civilization and perceived harm on moral judgment,to investigate the adaptability of Theory of Dyadic Morality in Chinese culture,at the same time to investigate the effect of emotion and need for harm avoidance,to explore the mechanism of moral judgment.And based on the existing research to further investigate the nature of harm perception,that the impact of perceived moral patient identity on moral judgment.This paper examines the mechanism of moral judgment through four studies.In study 1,the prototype paradigm was adopted and the existing research paradigm(Schein et al.,2015)was used for the classification of immoral behaviors.The conceptual characteristics of Chinese immoral behaviors were preliminarily investigated by the association frequency and degree of different categories of the contents of immoral behaviors.In study 2,26 immoral behaviors(Buchtel et al.,2015)were tested by related designs and were rated at immoral,harm and uncivilized.Meanwhile,the subjects were also asked to self-assess on the need for harm avoidance and their emotions.On the basis of study 1 and 2,study 3 further investigate the relationship between harm perception,uncivilized and immoral behavior by using implicit association test.Study 4 sets three types of moral patient by referring to the Model of Moral Motives: self,others and collective.Meanwhile,according to the research of Gutierrez et al.(2007),moral agent is taken as the fourth type of moral patient and the baseline of moral judgment.Study has shown(Gray,2014)that harm perception can predict the moral judgment of the subjects on suicidal behaviors.Therefore,in study 4,a self-designed suicide moral situation was used to activate harm perception to investigate the influence of perceiving different moral patient.The conlusion of the present study are as follows:(1)Chinese immoral concepts are mainly represented by incivilization and perceived harm,and there are differences in the immoral importance of perceived harm and incivilized with different cognitive processing methods: when subjects conduct moral reasoning,incivilization has greater moral importance;The perceived harm was of greater immoral importance when the subjects reacted intuitively.(2)Moral patients can be divided into three categories: self-harmed,others-harmed and collective-harmed.The perception of different moral patients leads to significant differences in moral judgment,among which the perceived self-harmed is judged to be the most immoral,followed by others-harmed,collective-harmed and hurting the agent himself.(3)Perceive different moral patients affects need for harm avoidance.In the case of self-harmed,the need for harm avoidance score of the subject is the highest,followed bycollective-harmed,others-harmed and hurting the agent himself.The following conclusions are drawn: Moral judgment is the product of moral reasoning and instinction,and there is a double processing mode of reasoning and intuition;Perceived harm is the deep motive of moral judgment.The perception of victimized objects has an impact on moral judgment,and the moral judgment is the most severe when the perception of self-victimization,and it shows that the need for harm avoidance playing an important role in moral judgment.