The Effects of Social Perception on Moral Judgment.

Wen Ying Jin,Ming Peng

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.557216

Abstract

When people express a moral judgment, others make inferences about their personality, such as whether they are warm or competent. People may use this interpersonal process to present themselves in a way that is socially acceptable in the current circumstances. Across four studies, we investigated this hypothesis in Chinese culture and showed that college student participants tended to associate others’ deontological moral judgments with warmth and utilitarian moral judgments with competence (Study 1, Mage = 21.1, SD = 2.45; Study 2, Mage = 20.53, SD = 1.87). In addition, participants made more deontological judgments after preparing to be interviewed for a job requiring them to be in a warm social role, and more utilitarian judgments after preparing for a job requiring them to be in a competent social role (Study 3, Mage = 19.5, SD = 1.63). This effect held true in moral dilemmas involving different degrees of hypothetical personal involvement, and appeared to be mediated by the perception of others’ expectations (Study 4, Mage = 19.92, SD = 1.97). The results suggest an important role for social cognition as an influence on moral judgments in Chinese culture.

Highlights

Moral judgment is the evaluation of a certain behavior as good or bad, or as right or wrong
This study found that participants made more positive evaluations of individuals who held deontological moral judgments, both in the moral dimension and in the warmth and competence dimensions, which indicates that deontological moral judgments contain prosocial information to some extent
We firstly introduced to all participants that warmth and competence are universal dimensions of social perception and each dimension was described by several labels

Summary

Introduction

Moral judgment is the evaluation of a certain behavior as good or bad, or as right or wrong. The goal of moral psychology is to clarify why individuals make the judgments they do about moral issues. Research on moral judgments has been especially influenced by the two most important normative ethics theories of the last several centuries, that is deontology and utilitarianism. Both theories prescribe logic for determining the morality of behavior. A deontological perspective is one that evaluates a behavior as right or wrong based on the action itself. A utilitarian perspective is one that evaluates a behavior as right or wrong based on the outcome of the action. In the field of moral psychology, the “moral dilemma” is a classic moral judgment problem that has been used in numerous studies to discover people’s tendency to make moral judgments in various situations

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Conclusion