The Impact Of Negative Awe On Moral Judgments

There is an extraordinary emotional experience in everyday life that transcends the definition of language and can have a profound and transformative impact on people,and researchers call the emotions that accompany this experience awe.Awe is an emotional response when an individual is confronted with a vast stimulus that transcends the current cognitive structure.Not only can it positively impact individuals on a mental health level and a social level,but it can also bring about subtle changes in people’s cognitive level through the experience of awe.Awe can be divided into positive awe and threat-based awe(negative awe)according to the specific assessment of the individual.Studies have shown that both positive and negative awe can promote prosocial behavior and social participation,and reduce individuals’ craving for money.However,different awe can also have different effects on an individual’s cognition.Compared to positive awe,negative awe causes individuals to have less tolerance for violations of social norms,experience less happiness,and generate less willingness to give time to helping others.Recent research has also shown that reverence is associated with moral judgments.Experiencing positive reverence enables people to make more moral judgments.However,previous research has only explored the impact of positive awe on moral judgments,not negative awe.Compared with European and American cultures,individuals in East Asian cultural backgrounds will have more negative awe.This study examines whether negative awe predisposes individuals to utilitarian moral judgments,using college students as participants.In this study,we used the moral dilemma story research paradigm to manipulate participants’ moral judgment tendencies by watching videos to stimulate emotions,in order to explore the influence of negative awe on moral judgment.Experiment 1 initiated positive awe,negative awe,and neutral emotion,respectively,and then asked participants to complete the moral dilemma story task.The results of experiment 1 showed that the negative awe group scored higher scores on the moral dilemma story than the positive awe group and neutral emotion group.Experiment 2 reduces situational involvement,replacing the first person with the third person in morality story material,further examining the influence of negative awe on moral judgment.Experiment 2 also found that participants in the negative awe group scored higher on stories of moral dilemmas.Since previous studies have shown that starting materials with negative awe can cause fear,the results of experiments 1 and 2 may not be caused by negative awe,but by fear.To rule out the influence of fear,Experiment 3 was added to the fear group and activated negative awe,fear,and neutral emotions.The experimental results showed that compared with the participants in the fear group and the neutral emotion group,the participants in the negative awe group scored higher in the stories of moral dilemmas.The results of this study suggest that negative awe predisposes individuals to utilitarian moral judgments.