The Impact Of Emotions On Moral Judgment

In recent years,with the further development of the market economy,the business environment has been characterized by delegation and empowerment,increasing diversity in society,and the blinding speed of technological change in organizations.Individuals are given more latitude in decision-making with fewer guidelines to use for direction.Individuals,rather than organizations,are the critical force in determining a business’ ethical direction.At the same time,most researches in the field of business ethics believe that moral emotion is the factor that cannot be ignored in the formation of the individual moral judgment.Although many empirical studies have shown that moral emotion is a subjective factor that regulates the formation of moral judgments,its role will vary with other factors such as mood types,situations,gender,etc.,even the same emotion claims inconsistency in different researches.Many scholars have tried to summarize the effects of emotions through the qualitative review approach,in order to explore the causes of the above inconsistency,and rarely adopt from a quantitative perspective.In this field,scholars have integrated the existing literature by the way of meta-analysis,but they almost focus on moral cognition and other complex cognitive process as well as single-model comparisons.There are fewer quantitative researches about the relationship between moral emotions and moral judgments.Based on this,this paper used meta-analysis to explore their relationship and explain the consistency.Firstly,by reviewing the domestic and foreign literatures on moral emotions,moral judgments and their relationship from 2000 to 2019,it summarized that the causes of differences were mainly manifested in five aspects: the type of moral emotions,the nature of moral emotions,the ways of inducing moral emotions,gender and age,and methods of measuring moral judgments.Then,through systematic sorting and classification,83 available empirical researches were extracted.From those researches,hypotheses and models were established to form an analytical framework for meta-analysis.Subsequently,adopting bayesian network approach,the Bayesian network was established,and the empirical data was integrated and analyzed through parameter learning and accurate reasoning.The results showed that:(1)Different emotions play various roles on moral judgments.Aversion makes the moral judgment severer,anger and sadness make it severer in specific situations,while happiness usually alleviates this rigorousness;(2)Moral emotion induction has a significant impact on the relationship between moral emotion and moral judgment;(3)Emotional state-trait has a significant impact on the relationship between moral mood and moral judgment;(4)The interaction between moral emotion induction and emotional state-trait has a significant impact on the relationship between moral emotion and moral judgment;(5)In terms of gender,male proportion has an impact on the moral judgments,and in the case of low ratio of male proportion,the probability of harsh moral judgment is high;(6)The way in which moral judgments are measured has significant effect on relation between moral emotion and moral judgment.Last,management suggestions are put forward to improve the organizational environment,staff recruitment and training,and the construction of corporate culture according to the research results.The meta-analysis of this paper is based on the bayesian network parameter learning.Compared with the traditional approaches,it can integrate a large number of empirical studies and analyze the differences between those researches,so as to provide a basis for solving the contradiction between different research results.Moreover,this approach expands the application scope of meta-analysis and provides a new method for reviewing research in other fields.