Abstract
Stress is prevalent in our daily life, and people often make moral decision-making in a stressful state. Several studies indicated the influence of acute stress on moral decision-making and behavior. The present study extended the investigation to chronic stress, and employed a new approach, the CNI model, to add new insights regarding the mechanism underlying the association between chronic stress and moral decision-making. A total of 197 undergraduates completed the Perceived Stress Scale and made moral decision-making on a series of deliberately designed moral dilemmas. The results indicated that higher chronic stress was related to more deontological moral choices. The process-dissociation analyses revealed that chronic stress was marginally significantly associated with deontological inclinations but not with utilitarian inclinations. And the CNI model analyses suggested that the high-stress group (above the median) showed a stronger general preference for inaction than the low-stress group (below the median) did, but there were no significant differences in sensitivity to consequences or sensitivity to moral norms between the two groups. Finally, the implications of the findings were discussed.
Highlights
Stress is ubiquitous in current society, and people often make moral decisions under a stressful state (Singer et al, 2017)
The present study attempted to contribute to this field by exploring the association between chronic stress and moral judgment using a new approach, the CNI model (Gawronski et al, 2017)
The present study aimed to extend the current investigation of stress and moral decision-making to chronic stress, and to provide new insights regarding the association using a CNI model
Summary
Stress is ubiquitous in current society, and people often make moral decisions under a stressful state (Singer et al, 2017). The direct investigation of how stress influences moral decision-making has not been conducted until the year 2011 (Starcke et al, 2011). The relationship between stress and moral decision-making has been gradually attracting researchers’ attention (Starcke et al, 2012; Youssef et al, 2012; Kossowska et al, 2016). The present study attempted to contribute to this field by exploring the association between chronic stress and moral judgment using a new approach, the CNI model (Gawronski et al, 2017). The dual-process theory of moral judgment proposed by Greene and his colleagues is among the well-known theories. According to this model, there are two independent processes involved in moral judgment: reason and emotion. Reasoning means that making a judgment mainly based on deliberation, while emotion
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