Intuitive Processing And Control Processing In Moral Judgment

Moral judgment refers to the activity that individuals give moral value to their behavior.The Social Intuitionist Model believes that people can make judgments based on an intuitive processing when facing moral situations.The dual process model of moral reasoning believes that people may make deontological(i.e.,not harming an innocent life)or utilitarian judgments(i.e.,avoiding injuries to a greater number of people)when facing moral situations.The model holds that the deontological judgment is an intuitive processing relying on individual emotions,while the utilitarian judgment is a controlled processing depending on their cognition.So is the controlled processing involved in moral judgments?If both the intuitive processing and controlled processing were involved in moral judgment,are they parallel processing or serial processing?Experiment 1 was performed to explore the mechanism of the moral judgements.The cognitive load and the types of moral judgment were set as independent variables while the judgment results and judgment confidence were considered as dependent variables.Sixty participants were randomly selected into the high cognitive load group and the low cognitive load group with thirty people in each group.Participants finished seventeen conflicting conditions in which they make one of two kinds of judgments(i.e.,the deontological or utilitarian judgement),and seventeen non-conflicting conditions in which one of the option in this condition of including the deontological judgment and utilitarian judgment is called consent judgments.The results showed that less deontological judgments were found in low cognitive load group than the high cognitive load group;Under the condition of high cognitive load,the judgement confidence in deontological judgment and utilitarian judgment was significantly lower than that of the consensus judgment.Compared with the conditions of low cognitive load,the confidence of utilitarian and deontological judgment under the conditions of high cognitive load was significantly lower.Experiment 2 was performed to investigate the mechanism of the moral judgements with the time pressure and the types of moral judgment as independent variables and judgment results and judgment confidence as the dependent variables.Sixty participantswere selected to participate in the experiment.All participants were required to complete the experimental tasks under the time pressure and the no time pressure conditions.And they need to complete the moral dilemmas including seventeen conflict conditions and seventeen non-conflict conditions.The results showed that less deontological judgments were found in no time pressure conditions than in the time pressure conditions;The confidence of making deontological judgments and utilitarian judgments is significantly lower than that of the consensent judgment(including deontological judgment and utilitarian judgments)in the condition of time pressure;Compared with no time pressure,the confidence of making a utilitarian judgment and deontological judgment is significantly lower in time pressure conditions than in the no time pressure conditions;The reversed judgment were found,that is,participants made deontological judgments under time pressure condition while they made utilitarian judgments under no time pressure condition,vice versa.Twenty seven participants were selected in Experiment 3 to investigate the demand for cognitive resources in the deontological judgment and utilitarian judgment with the eye-tracking technique.We used the eye-tracking technique to record the gaze duration and the number of fixations when the participants read the moral dilemma.Participants finished seventeen conflicting conditions in which they make one of two kinds of judgments(i.e.,the deontological or utilitarian judgement),and seventeen non-conflicting conditions in which one of the option in this condition of including the deontological judgment and utilitarian judgment is called consent judgments.The greater gaze duration and the number of fixations were found when the participants made judgments in the conflict conditions than that when they made judgments in the non-conflict conditions;The greater gaze duration and the number of fixations were found when the participants made deontological judgments than that when they made the consistent judgments;The participants' gaze duration when making utilitarian judgment was significantly longer than that of consistent judgment.In summary,these results demonstrate supports that the internal processing mechanism of moral judgment is a mixed processing model.The deontological and utilitarian judgments can be triggered by an intuitive processing as well as a controlled procesing.Theintuitive stage is processed prioritizedly and then the controlled processing happens.The research results deepen human understanding of the cognitive mechanism of moral judgment.