The Influence Of Sense Of Power On Moral Judgment

Moral judgment as an indispensable evaluation process in our daily life,reflects the ability of individuals to evaluate and judge whether the behavior is appropriate in the interaction of social relations,which will directly affect the final behavior of individuals.Power as a social relations in the important variables of individual psychology and behavior,previous studies based on the traditional dilemma paradigm have found that either the idiosyncratic sense of power shaped by one’s upbringing or actual social role or the situational sense of power triggered by the external environment can influence people’s utilitarian or deontological tendencies in moral judgement,but due to the limitations of the paradigm itself,the relationship between the two has not yet been agreed.To address the limitations of the traditional dilemma paradigm,Gawronski et al.applied a polynomial modelling approach to the study of moral judgments and proposed the methodologically more advanced CNI model of moral judgments,and many national and international studies have confirmed the effectiveness of the CNI model in addressing key issues in the current field of moral judgement research.Among the small number of studies that have used the CNI model to explore how a sense of power affects moral judgments,researchers have separately explored the influence of idiosyncratic sense of power or situational sense of power initiated by different initiation paradigms on moral judgments,but there are currently fewer studies on this aspect in China.In addition,previous studies based on the traditional dilemma paradigm have revealed that individuals with high trait power sense(mismatched internal and external power perceptions)tend to make deontic moral judgments under low situational power sense initiation conditions,but this finding has not yet been verified in studies related to the CNI model.Based on this,this study uses the CNI model as a research tool to examine the influence of different types of power perceptions on moral judgments,and to investigate whether people’s own internal trait power perceptions and external situational power perceptions have a joint effect on moral judgments,based on theories related to power perceptions from a social psychological perspective.Specifically,Study 1 aimed to examine the relationship between the subjects’ own idiosyncratic sense of power and their moral judgments in a state of natural power.Studies 2 and 3 examined the influence of the external sense of power,initiated by a story recall task,and the implicit sense of power,initiated by a word search task,on subjects’ moral judgments,respectively.In addition,based on study 1 further explored the joint effect of matching/mismatching between subjects’ internal and external power perceptions on their moral judgments.Combining these 3 studies,the following conclusions were drawn.(1)Individuals with a high trait sense of power are more sensitive to moral norms and prefer deontological moral judgments,whereas individuals with a low trait sense of power are the opposite.(2)Under the episodic situational power activation condition,individuals are able to directly perceive differences in power hierarchies with others.This leads to an asymmetrical dependence between high and low power-sense individuals(high power-sense individuals rely less on others and low power-sense individuals rely more on others),making high episodic power-sense individuals pay less attention to the ideas and moral norms of others and prefer utilitarian moral judgments;the opposite is true for low episodic power-sense individuals.(3)Under the condition of implicit situational power activation,individuals are not clearly aware of the power hierarchy differences with others.In such situations,where hierarchy is precarious and power may be weakened or lost,individuals with a high implicit sense of power will be more conservative,pay attention to moral norms to maintain their power position,and prefer moral judgments of a moral nature,whereas individuals with a low implicit sense of power will prefer the opposite.(4)Finally,the results of Study 2 and Study 3 on the effects of matching/mismatching between internal and external power senses on moral judgments indicate that under the low situational power sense initiation condition,due to the mismatch between the low situational power sense conferred by the external environment and the high trait power sense individuals’ own power perceptions,they experience psychological and physical discomfort,and individuals are more inclined to change this discomfort through action(action preference),preferring Choosing utilitarian moral judgements.