The Influence Of Target Object And Harm On Individual Moral Judgment

Objectives: Moral judgment refers to an individual's judgment of the good or bad of others or the right or wrong of things.The purpose of this study is to fill the gap in previous studies,and to explore the influence of target objects and degree of harm on individual moral judgment and its psychological mechanism based on the theory of mind perception and binary morality,to reveal the reasons for the exception of children as moral judgments.Methods: This study is divided into two experiments using the experimental method.Experiment 1 is the internal design of single factor subjects.The independent variable is the target object,and the dependent variable is the degree of moral error and the level of forgiveness.Experiment 2 was 2(target subjects: adults vs children)×2(injury degree: high vs low).The independent variables are the target object and the degree of harm,and the dependent variables are the degree of moral error and the level of forgiveness.Results: Two experiments of this paper adopts SPSS20.0 for data analysis and the experimental results show that an individual's moral error degree to children and adults(t(272)= 5.622,p< 0.001),and judgment of the degree of forgiveness(t(272)= 6.309,p < 0.001)are significant differences,the specific performance in individual degree of moral wrong judgment of children was significantly lower than adults,an individual's degree of forgiveness is significantly higher than adults to children in the experiment.The results show that when the degree of the dependent variable is morally wrong,the target object and damage degree of interaction,F(1,58)= 4.11,p <0.05,p2 = 0.066,the high and low damage scenarios,moral standing both in the target object and the moral level of degree of error and forgiveness partial intermediary effect.Conclusions:(1)The target object of moral judgment will have a significant impact on the individual's moral judgment,which is embodied in the fact that the individual is more lenient in moral judgment on children,and the children's moral violations are easier to be forgiven.The participants' empathy and parental care levels both influenced their moral judgments to others.(2)Both the target object and the degree of harm affect the individual's moral judgment.Regardless of whether the target of moral judgment is an adult or a child,the individual believes that the target in the high-harm scenario is more morally wrong and should not be forgiven.In both high and low harm scenarios,individuals believe that children's moral errors are lower than adults' and children should be forgiven more,because of the indirect influence of the moral standing of the target object.Moral standing is the reason why children are the exception to moral judgment.