Age Differences In Moral Judgment And Its Potential Psychological Mechanisms

Morality is a pervasive and in-depth research topic in the field of psychological development.The distinction between good and evil,good and bad,pervades daily public behavior.In socialization,people gradually develop the ability to judge the right or wrong,good or evil of themselves and others according to specific standards,representing the individual’s ability to make moral judgments,yet people’s decisions often vary widely.Of these,the age difference in moral judgments is an important research issue.For a long time,researchers have been interested in capturing the psychological process of whether and how moral judgments change with age over a lifetime to predict individual socialization level better,guide social cooperation behavior,and enhance personal and inter-group relations.The paradigm of classic moral dilemmas,such as the trolley dilemma,often requires people to choose between sacrificing one life or five.Such a psychological game is challenging,just as you cannot have it both ways.To reveal people’s differences in a moral dilemma,Greene proposed the dual-processing theory of moral judgment.The core of the dual-processing theory is to distinguish between the utilitarian and deontological inclinations of moral judgment.The theory assumes that utilitarianism’s criterion is to maximize returns(trade one for five)and usually associated with cognitive control processing.Similar but different,the deontologist criterion consistency with moral norms(do not harm the innocent)is often associated with higher emotional responses.Research on judgment and decision-making in the whole life cycle shows that the relative psychological mechanism of cognitive and affective processing changes with age and then influences the relationship between age and moral judgment.However,there are significant theoretical and empirical differences in the research process.Many scholars have reflected on the traditional dilemma paradigm’s problems,such as insufficient practical application,fuzzy definition characteristics,and straightforward interpretation of the utilitarian and deontological inclinations against each other.To solve the drawbacks of the traditional paradigm,Gawronski proposed a CNI model of moral judgment.In the CNI model,the sensitivity of the consequences(C parameter),the sensitivity of moral norms(N parameter),and the general action versus inaction tendency(I parameter)were quantified and compared independently by the multinomial processing tree model.In a way,the CNI model can provide a more accurate explanation for the psychological processes and mechanisms that people show when making moral judgments.In conclusion,this study explores the age difference of moral judgment based on the CNI model to provide a new perspective for studying the relationship between moral judgment and age.The research contents mainly include 1)the influence of age on moral judgment and its psychological process;2)the role of cognition in the effect of age on moral judgment.Study 1 examined the effect of age on moral judgment.The results were as follows:1)the score of utilitarianism moral judgment in the elderly group was significantly lower than that in the younger group.2)after fitting the CNI model,the study found that the elderly group was more likely than younger adults to make a general inaction preference(I parameter),and sensitivity of the consequences(C parameter)was significantly lower.Still,the sensitivity of moral norms(N parameter)was not significantly different.Older people are less sensitive to the consequences,which may be related to a decline in their cognitive resources.Furthermore,study 2 investigated the role of cognitive load.Results were as follows: 1)under low cognitive load conditions,the utilitarian moral judgment score of the elderly group was significantly lower than that of the young group;under high load cognitive conditions,the difference of the utilitarian moral judgment score was not significant.2)compared with low cognitive load conditions,fitting the CNI model,we found that the general inaction tendency(I parameter)of the elderly group was significantly increased than under the high cognitive load condition.The consequences sensitivity(C parameter)of the age group had no significant difference,but the overall age group’s consequences sensitivity decreased significantly.Unfortunately,there was no significant difference between the two groups in the moral norms’ sensitivity(N parameter).This study provides a new perspective and evidence for the age difference in moral judgment.Results show that: 1)there are age differences in moral judgment,older adults make less utilitarian moral judgments than younger adults;2)the CNI model study found that older adults showed fewer explicit utilitarian judgments,which reason is that they experience a decrease in sensitivity to the consequences of harmful behavior(profit maximization)and an increase in the tendency of general inaction,but not the increase in sensitivity to moral norms(moral norms consistency);3)cognitive resources are the key mechanism underlying age differences in moral judgments.The CNI model shows that cognitive load decreases the consequences sensitivity of the age group but increases general inaction tendency,which decreases the possibility of the older group making more utilitarian moral judgments.