The Impact Mechanism Of Moral Elevation On Moral Sensitivity

Moral elevation is an individual’ s tendency to respond to emotions or positive emotional experience when they see virtue behavior.Some studies have found that moral elevation can effectively promote moral behaviors such as donation,altruism,and voluntary service.However,the mechanism of the effect of moral elevation on moral behavior is still unclear.Moral sensitivity is the ability of an individual to identify the moral issues of the situation,which has two major parts: dispositional moral sensitivity is based on moral value priority,contextual moral sensitivity is to sense the environmental moral information.Moral sensitivity is a vital part of moral behavior.Investigating the influence mechanism of moral elevation on moral sensitivity is of great significance for understanding the bias of moral behavior and improving the moral quality of citizens.This thesis based on two progressive studies to explore the influence mechanism of moral elevation on moral sensitivity:Study 1 examines the influence of moral elevation on moral sensitivity in daily life from the personality traits,and uses prosocial tendency as indicator of moral motivation to examine the mediating role.The study is conducted by use Chinese version of the moral elevation scale,dispositional moral sensitivity questionnaire and prosocial tendencies measure,It used field investigation and Wenjuanxing as two channels,which contributed 452 valid samples.Results showed:(1)Moral elevation traits,dispositional moral sensitivity and prosocial tendency have positively correlations(ps <0.001);(2)moral elevation traits can positively predict prosocial tendency(β = 0.62,p <0.001)and dispositional moral sensitivity(β = 0.32,p <0.001).(3)Prosocial tendency has a full mediating effect between moral elevation traits and dispositional moral sensitivity(indirect effect = 0.29,LLCI = 0.21,ULCI = 0.37);all results was not affected by demographic variables such as gender,education,and major(ps ≥ 0.15).Study 2 examines the impact of moral elevation on moral sensitivity from the behavioral responses,as well as oderate role of member relationship in the face of moral problems.In the state of moral elevation induced by video material,Molenbergh’ s experimental paradigm was used to set up the injury situation and measure the contextual moral sensitivity.At the same time,136 valid data were collected to manipulate the internal and external group belonging relationship of the perpetrators and victims in the injury situation.Results showed:(1)moral elevation can enhance the contextual moral sensitivity(p = 0.033),especially the emotional state(p = 0.013)to harmful behavior;(2)moral sensitivity in the experimental group was affected by interaction between the perpetrator and the victim’ s group(p = 0.002),when the outgroup attacks the ingroup,the moral sensitivity is the strongest,and when the ingroup attacks the outgroup,the moral sensitivity is the weakest;no interaction between member relationship was found in the control group(p = 0.770),and the moral sensitivity remained relatively stable at a moderate level.Conclusions:1.Moral elevation can enhance moral sensitivity at both personality and behavioral response.2.Moral elevation traits enhance dispositional moral sensitivity through moral motivation.3.In the behavioral response,the moral elevation mainly enhances the emotional state of moral sensitivity,however,this positive effect is influenced by ingroup favoritism.