Abstract
Intuitive moral emotions play a major role in forming our opinions and moral decisions. However, it is not yet known how we perceive the subjective time of moral-related information. In this study, we compared subjective durations of phrases depicting immoral, disgust, or neutral behaviors in a duration bisection task and found that phrases depicting immoral behavior were perceived as lasting longer than the neutral and disgusting phrases. By contrast, the subjective duration of the disgusting phrase, unlike the immoral phrase, was comparable to the neutral phrase. Moreover, the lengthening effect of the immoral phrase relative to the neutral phrase was significantly correlated to the anonymously prosocial tendency of the observer. Our findings suggest that immoral phrases induce embodied moral reaction, which alters emotional state and subsequently lengthens subjective time.
Highlights
When reading newspaper headlines or browsing internet news, many of us are often captured by moral-related news as compared to other politics-related news, and our emotions follow the story
The results showed the immoral phrase was perceived longer in duration than the neutral and disgust phrases with the same physical duration, while the latter two did not differ from each other in duration judgments
The positive correlation indicates that the higher the anonymous prosocial tendency is, the less the overestimation would be for the immoral phrase
Summary
When reading newspaper headlines or browsing internet news, many of us are often captured by moral-related news as compared to other politics-related news, and our emotions follow the story. Such attentional capture and intuitive reaction seem to be very natural for us. Reading news about immoral behavior causes us a negative emotion It is not yet known if such negative emotion induced by an immoral stimulus would lengthen its subjective time, given that it remains controversial regarding subjective time distorted by negative emotion (Droit-Volet et al, 2013; Lake, 2016; Droit-Volet, 2019). The connection to the subjective time of stimuli related to morality has not been formally investigated. We hypothesize the relations between moral information and subjective time, and in the end, we propose the experimental design to verify our hypotheses
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